Library of Congress, 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



. M4 



Shelf. 



] ^ OC n^ 



Modern English Writers 



JOHN RUSKIN 



MODERN ENGLISH WRITERS, 



MATTHEW ARNOLD .... Professor Saintsbury. 

R. L. STEVENSON L. Cope Cornford. 

JOHN RUSKIN Mrs Meynell. 

TENNYSON Andrew Lang. 

GEORGE ELIOT Sidney Lee. 

BROWNING C. H. Herford. 

FROUDE John Oliver Hobbes. 

HUXLEY Edward Clodd. 

THACKERAY Charles Whibi.ey. 

DICKENS W. E. Henley. 

*** Other Volumes will be ainiozmccd in due course. 



WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, Edinburgh and London. 



JOHN RUSKIN 



/ 

MRS MEYNELL 



SECOND IMPRESSION 



WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS 

EDINBURGH AND LONDON 

M D C C C C 



All Rights reser-ved 






a 

6 'OO" 



DEDICATED TO 

Lieut.-General Sir W. F. BUTLER, K.C.B. 



"^ British Officer who is singularly of one mind 
•with me Ofi matters regarding the nation's honour." 

— PREFACE TO RUSKIN'S "BIBLE OF AMIENS." 



CONTENTS. 



CHAP. 

I. INTRODUCTION .... 

II. 'MODERN painters': THE FIRST VOLUME 

III. 'MODERN PAINTERS': THE SECOND VOLUME 

IV. 'MODERN PAINTERS': THE THIRD AND FOURTH 

VOLUMES .... 

V. ' MODERN PAINTERS ' : THE FIFTH VOLUME 
VI. 'THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE* 
VII. 'THE STONES OF VENICE* 
VIII. ' PRE-RAPHAELITISM ' . . . 

IX. ' LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING ' 
X. ' ELEMENTS OF DRAWING ' 
XI. ' THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART * 
XII. 'THE TWO PATHS* 

XIII. 'UNTO THIS LAST* 

XIV. 'SESAME AND LILIES* 

XV. ' THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE ' . 



I 
TO 
38 

48 

67 

82 

102 

122 

127 

136 

140 
152 
166 
179 



Vlll 



CONTENTS. 



XVI. ' TIME AND TIDE BY WEARE AND TYNE ' 
XVII. 'THE QUEEN OF THE AIR ' 
XVIII. 'LECTURES ON ART' 
XIX. 'ARATRA PENTELICI ' 
XX. 'THE eagle's NEST ' 
XXI. 'ARIADNE FLORENTINA ' 
XXII. ' VAL D'aRNO ' 

XXIII. 'DEUCALION' 

XXIV. 'PROSERPINA' 
XXV. GUIDE-BOOKS: 'MORNINGS IN FLORENCE* — ' ST 

mark's REST' — 'THE BIBLE OF AMIENS ' 
XXVI. 'FORS clavigera' 
XXVII. 'pr^terita' .... 

CHRONOLOGY ..... 

INDEX ...... 



183 
189 
194 
209 
214 
227 

244 
251 

258 
270 



293 
298 



JOHN R U S K I N. 



CHAPTER I. 
INTRODUCTION. 

John Ruskin's life was not only centred, but limited, 
by the places where he was born and taught, and 
by the things he loved. The London suburb and 
the English lake -side for his homes, Oxford for his 
place first of study and then of teaching, usually one 
beaten road by France, Switzerland, and Italy for his 
annual journeys — these closed the scene of his dwell- 
ings and travellings. There was a water-colour drawing 
by his father that interested him when he was a little 
boy in muslin and a sash (as Northcote painted him, 
with his own chosen " blue hills " for a background), 
and this drawing hung over his bed when he died ; 
the evenings of his last days were passed in the chair 
wherein he preached in play a sermon before he could 
well pronounce it. The nursery lessons and the house- 

A 



2 JOHN RUSKIN. 

hold ways of the home on Heme Hill partly remained 
with him, reverend and unquestionable, to his last day. 
And yet the student of the work done in this quiet 
life of repetitions is somewhat shaken from the stead- 
fastness of study by two things — multitude and move- 
ment. The multitude is in the thoughts of this great 
and original mind, and the movement is the world's. 
Ruskin's enormous work has never had steady auditors 
or spectators : it may be likened to a sidereal sky 
beheld from an earth upon the wing. Many, innumer- 
able, are the points that seem to shift and journey, to 
the shifting eye. Partly it was he himself who altered 
his readers ; and partly they changed with the long 
change of a nation ; and partly they altered with suc- 
cessive and recurrent moods. John Ruskin wrote first 
for his contemporaries, young men ; fifty years later he 
wrote for the same readers fifty years older, as well as 
for their sons. And hardly has a mob of Shakespeare's 
shown more sudden, unanimous, or clamorous versions 
and reversions of opinion than those that have ac- 
claimed and rejected, derided and divided, his work, 
once to ban and bless, and a second time to bless 
and ban. 

Political economy in i860 had but one orthodoxy, 
which was that of " Manchester " ; scientifically, it held 
competition in production and in distribution, with the 
removal (as far as was possible to coherent human 
society) of all intervention of explicit social legislation, 
to be favourable to the wealth of nations ; and ethically 



INTRODUCTION. 3 

it held that if only the world would leave opposing 
egoisms absolutely free, and would give self-interest the 
opportunity of perfection, a violent, hostile, mechanical 
equity and justice would come to pass. Only let men 
resolve never to relax or cede for the sake of forbearance 
or compassion, and the Manchester system would be 
found to work for good. In i860 it was much in 
favour of this doctrine that itself and all its workings 
were alike unbeautiful to mind and eye. Men might 
regret the vanishing beauty of the world, but they 
were convinced that it was the ugly thing that was 
"useful," and that, as it did not attract, it would not 
deceive. Before the closing of the century all men 
changed their mind. But when Ruskin warned them 
that scientifically their " orthodox " economy made for 
an intolerable poverty, that ethically it aimed at making 
men less human, and that practically it could never, 
while n:an was no less than man, have the entire and 
universal freedom of action upon which its hope of 
ultimate justice depended ; when he recommended a 
more organic and less mechanical equity — he was 
hooted to silence. 

Ruskin first commended the rejoining together of art 
and handicraft, put asunder in the decline of the " Re- 
naissance " ; and for this too he was generally derided, 
because men were sure that the ugly thing was the 
useful and the comfortable. John Ruskin would show 
them that it was neither of these, but they would have 
it that he was showing them merely that it was ugly. 



4 JOHN RUSKIN. 

That is, he was accused of teaching sentimentality in 
pubUc economy and in art, whereas his teaching dealt 
with human character and ultimate utility. 

But the moving world has rejected his teaching more 
violently after fifty years, in two things more momentous 
than the rest : it has gone further in that enquiry as to 
the origin of the ideas of moral good and evil against 
which Ruskin warned it in the words of Carlyle ; and it 
has multiplied its luxuries. By these two actions it has 
effectually rejected the teaching of Ruskin. 

" The moving world " : assuredly this great thinker 
gave years of thought to the discovery of moral causes 
for the enormous losses of mankind, and did not suffi- 
ciently confess the obscure motive power of change. 
Byzantine architecture was overcome by Gothic, not 
only because Gothic was strongly north - western, but 
because it was new ; Gothic was supplanted by the 
Renaissance, not only because Gothic was enfeebled, 
but because the Renaissance was new. He saw the 
beauty of the hour with eyes and heart so full of felicity 
that he cried, " Stay, thou art so fair ! " It never 
stayed, passing by the law — but how shall we dare 
to call that a law whereof we know not the cause, the 
end, or the sanctions ? Let us rather, ignorant yet 
vigilant, call it the custom — of the universe. 

John Ruskin himself has told us his life in exquisite 
detail. He underwent in childhood a strict discipline, 
common in those times, had no toys, was " whipped," 
was compelled to a self-denial that he perceived his 



INTRODUCTION. 5 

elders did not practise upon themselves. It was the 
asceticism of the day, reserved for the innocent. Charles 
Dickens did more than any man to make the elderly 
ashamed of it. Ruskin's mother kept the training of 
the child in her own hands, and subjected him and 
herself to a hardly credible humiliation by the reading 
aloud, in alternate verses, of the whole Bible, Levitical 
Law and all, beginning again at Genesis when the 
Apocalypse was finished. She was her husband's senior, 
and, like him, of the Evangelical sect. She dedicated 
this her only child " to the Lord " before his birth, and 
when his genius appeared hoped he would be a bishop. 
He obeyed her, tended and served her, till at ninety 
years old she died. 

John Ruskin's father was a Scottish wine-merchant, 
well educated and liberally interested in the arts. He 
married his first cousin, daughter of an inn-keeper at 
Croydon, prospered greatly in trade by his partnership 
with Telford and Domecq, and rose in the world. His 
sister was married to a tanner at Perth ; his wife's 
sister to a baker at Croydon. His son, born at 54 
Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, on February 8, i8ig, 
took his first little journeys on his visits to these aunts. 
The child remembered the street home, but it was in 
his Heme Hill home and in the Heme Hill garden 
that he became possessed of the antiquities of childhood. 

The boy learnt, in his companionship with his father 
and mother, to love Scott, Rogers, and Byron, and he 
remained nobly docile to the admirations of his dear 



6 JOHN RUSKIN. 

elders. Otherwise, one should have needed to quote 
some phrase of his own to define the feebleness of the 
Italy, the cold corruption of heart of Don Juan, the 
inventory of nature's beauties versified by Scott. Rus- 
kin was impulsive : sometimes he loved a thing first 
seen more than he was to love it later ; but generally he 
loved the customs of his sweet childhood. He read 
with a tutor — a nonconformist minister, Dr Andrews, 
the father of the lady who became Coventry Patmore's 
first wife ; matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, in 
1836, where he won the Newdigate prize {Sa/se//e and 
Elephanta the subject) in 1839; became Honorary 
Student of Christ Church and Honorary Fellow of 
Corpus Christi, and Slade Professor (Chair of Fine 
Arts founded by Felix Slade) in 1870, to be three 
times re-elected. His boyish education had been 
furthered by annual journeys with his father and mother, 
first in Britain, on wine -selling business, and then 
abroad, always in a travelling carriage. The three used 
to set out in the May of all these years; and the last 
journey was in 1859, in Germany. Early in his teens 
the boy fell in love with the daughter of his father's 
partner, Mr Domecq, and suffered a decline of health 
in his disappointment. But the friendship with Turner 
(if tliat could be called a friendship which seemed to 
have such strange reserves) was the central fiict of his 
life as a young man. 

The little family took up its abode in a larger and 
more worldly house, 163 Denmark Hill, in 1S43. I" 



INTRODUCTION. 7 

1848 Ruskin married, most unfortunately; his wife left 
him a few years later, the marriage was legally annulled, 
and he lived again, as though he were a boy, with his 
parents. More than twenty years later a lady who 
had been his girlish disciple and whom he had long 
loved, but who seemed unable to decide for or against 
a marriage with him, died estranged. 

This solitary life was consoled during all its middle 
and later terms by the affection of his cousin, Mrs 
Arthur Severn, who had lived with his mother in her 
widowhood, and bore him company, with her husband 
and children, until his death in his home at Brantwood, 
Coniston, on the 20th of January 1900. 

John Ruskin had been a writer from his babyhood. 
The first expectation was of the poetic genius, but his 
poems were never more than mediocre. His prose 
asserted itself quickly, for he was only twenty-four when 
the first volume of ATodern Painters was published. His 
renunciation of the sectarian religion of his parents will 
be told further on. He was always essentially religious, 
but he passed, during the later maturity of his mind, 
through some years of doubt as to authoritative doc- 
trine, returning to definite beliefs in course of time. 
His Oxford and other series of lectures, and the 
undertaking of the St George's Company, will be 
touched upon in this volume in their place amongst 
his works. Of those works I have attempted the 
analysis, slight and brief, but essential, with quota- 
tions from beautiful and indispensable pages. I intend 



8 JOHN RUSKIN. 

the following essay to be principally a hand-book of 
Ruskin. 

In his central or later-central years John Ruskin was 
a thin and rather tall man, very English (Scottish in 
fact, but I mean to indicate the physique that looks 
conspicuous on the Continent), active and light, with 
sloping shoulders ; he had a small face with large 
features, the eyebrows, nose, and under-lip prominent ; 
his eyes were blue, and the blue tie — by the peculiar 
property of a strong blue to increase a neighbouring 
lesser blue, instead of quenching it — made them look 
the bluest of all blue eyes. He had the r in the throat, 
the r of the Parisians, which gives a certain weakness to 
English speech ; and in lecturing he had a rather clerical 
inflexion. He was a disciple (as in his relation to 
Carlyle and later to Professor Norton), a master, a 
pastor, a chivalrous servant to the young and weak, 
but too anxious, too lofty, to be in the equal sense 
a friend. 

He was broken by sorrow long before he died. His 
purposes had been, for the time, defeated. His final 
renunciation of the Slade Professorship (he had resigned 
it before for one interval in a time of deep grief) was 
due to the vote passed to establish a physiological 
laboratory (to establish, that is, vivisection) at the 
museum at Oxford : he took this for a sign of the 
contradiction of the world. He has left his museum 
at Sheffield, a linen industry at Keswick, and handloom 
weaving at Langdale, fairly successful, the Turner 



INTRODUCTION. 9 

drawings arranged (at indescribable labour) in the 
National Gallery, and his public gifts. But much of 
his work that was not the written word passed, like 
the drawing-lessons he had given to working-men at 
their classes in Great Ormond Street and in the fields, 
in 1857. But it was not failure or rejection, or even 
partial and futile acceptance, that finally and interiorly 
bowed him. " Your poor John Ruskin " (his signature 
in writing to one who loved and understood him) was 
the John Ruskin who never pardoned himself for stop- 
ping short of the whole renunciation of a Saint Francis. 
Lonely and unhappy does the student perceive him to 
have been who was one of the greatest of great men 
of all ages ; but the student who is most cut to the 
heart by that perception is compelled to wish him 
to have been not less but more a man sacrificed. 



lO 



CHAPTER II. 

'MODERN PAINTERS.' 
THE FIRST VOLUME (1843). 

" The picture which is looked to for an interpreta- 
tion of nature is invaluable, but the picture which is 
taken as a substitute for nature had better be burned." 
John Ruskin began to write Modern Painters in order 
to teach men how they should see Turner to be like 
nature, whereas the " critics " of that day called him 
unnatural. The " critics " of our days would leave that 
word to their wives and daughters. But it was a word 
for the best reviews in the middle of the century. In 
order to prove this delicate point as to the interpreta- 
tion of nature and its value, John Ruskin, then very 
young, wrote the first half of the first volume, and 
the discussion of Turner follows, with the universal 
digressions that make of this volume and its fellows 
a work at once of unity of motive and of multi- 
tudinous variety. The first volume is written with ex- 
treme explicatory labour. Having thought out a certain 



•modern painters'— first volume. II 

difficult thesis, the writer bends every power to the task 
of communication. What he has to impose is no state 
or grace or affection, what he has to communicate is no 
conjecture, nor does he make his way by that attractive 
divination of authorship which is companionable, now 
at fault, now halting, now leading with confidence a 
new and untried way. No more than a treatise of 
science is this work designed to bid the reader to that 
table of entertainment, the art of English prose. It 
is only at intervals, and at the end of a clause of 
explanation, that this author, who has excited so many 
enthusiasms, some futile and some worthy, by an over- 
abundant eloquence — a pure style but somewhat pro- 
digal — adorns his argument with a cadence, a group of 
beautiful warm words, as it were alight and in time, 
"musical "and "pictorial," the vital, just, and brilliant 
phrase that afterwards took the nation. 

The argument is difficult — difficult in the prolonged 
study made by him who wrought it from the beginning 
to the end, most difficult to present sufficiently in a brief 
commentary such as this. What Ruskin had to prove 
was that a few greatly admired masters — Salvator Rosa, 
Caspar Poussin, and Claude, especially — were inferior 
as painters of landscape to a certain number of English 
artists at work about the middle of the nineteenth cen- 
tury ; but their inferiority also to the earlier masters 
whose landscape was but an accessory, and to the 
Venetians of the great school of colour, whose landscape 
has been mistaken for arbitrary decoration, makes so 



12 JOHN RUSKIN. 

large an incident of the work that the title becomes 
questionable. Modern Painters proved to be a great 
apology for the art of the past, and of all periods of the 
past, for Gainsborough profits splendidly : the antithesis 
disappears. Salvator Rosa, Caspar Poussin, and Claude 
have, besides, ceased (thanks to Ruskin's own teaching) 
to have the importance that the critics of sixty years ago 
assigned to them ; their names do not stand, in our 
thoughts to-day, opposed conspicuously to those of later 
men now long dead, and brought, in our view, near to 
those predecessors by the perspective of time. The 
slight anomaly of the name Moder?i Painters is increased 
for us now ; but that name represents much that is of 
significance. The admiration of Salvator Rosa and the 
contempt of Turner, the fact that Claude was a 
seventeenth century painter and Turner was new, are 
things important in the history of the authorship of 
Modern Paijiters. Let it be noted here that a writer 
to whom was committed by one of the principal reviews 
the criticism of art in 1842 preferred a Mr Lee to Gains- 
borough — "he is superior to him always in subject, 
composition, and variety " — not with an irresponsible 
preference, but with the preference of a connaisseur, 
" subject, composition, and variety " not being things 
whereof the first comer is able so to print opinions. 
" Shade of Gainsborough ! " says Ruskin — " deep- 
thoughted, solemn Gainsborough, forgive us for re- 
writing this sentence." Lee was a painter more insular 
than it is permitted to a painter to be, piecemeal and 



'MODERN PAINTERS' — FIRST VOLUME. I 3 

literal, and very cold in colour; "well-intentioned, 
simple, free from affectation," and doing his work " with 
constant reference to nature," says the preface to the 
second edition of Modern Painters, but lacking " those 
technical qualities which are more especially the object 
of an artist's admiration." This phrase is quoted here 
because it is one of many that should keep the reader 
straight in the following of the doctrine of this book. 
A reader who had spared himself the pains of close 
following might think Ruskin to have taught that " well- 
intentioned " work bearing a " constant reference to 
nature" had nearly all the qualities, whereas in this 
passage he declares it to have, virtually, none. 

The evil of the ancient landscape art (Ruskin per- 
sistently calls it ancient, but let the reader bear in 
mind that he is in the act of comparing it with more 
ancient as well as with modern) " lies, I believe," says 
this preface to the second edition, 

" in the painter's taking upon him to modify God's works 
at his pleasure, casting the shadow of himself on all 
he sees. We shall not pass through a single gallery of 
old art without hearing this topic of praise confidently 
advanced. The sense of artificialness, . . . the clumsi- 
ness of combination by which the meddling of man is 
made evident, and the feebleness of his hand branded 
on the inorganisation of his monstrous creature, are 
advanced as a proof of inventive power." 

We ought to note the word " inorganisation." For we 
shall be willing to take it from Ruskin that the painter 
convicted of that is the one condemned : he who 



14 JOHN RUSKIN. 

destroys in order to reconstruct produces inorganised 
work, and work therefore without vitaUty. But a 
certain foreseen and judicial rearrangement of natural 
facts — a new but indestructive relation — proves that 
very organic quality, and is defended, not once or 
twice, but a hundred times, in the teaching of Modern 
Painters. And only by exquisitely close reading can 
we distinguish and reconcile, so as to take this defence 
and also what follows : — 

" In his observations on the foreground of the San 
Pietro Martire, Sir Joshua advances, as matter of praise, 
that the plants are discriminated 'just as much as was 
necessary for variety, and no more.' Had this fore- 
ground been occupied by a group of animals, we should 
have been surprised to be told that the lion, the serpent, 
and the dove . . . were distinguished from each other 
just as much as was necessary for variety, and no more. 
... If the distinctive forms of animal life are meant 
for our reverent observance, is it likely that those of 
vegetable life are made merely to be swept away?" 

(In this case Sir Joshua, according to Modern 
Painters, was wrong even as to facts, and Titian, like 
Raphael, was accurate in his foreground flowers.) Sir 
Joshua separates, says Ruskin, " as chief enemies, the 
details and the whole, which an artist cannot be great 
unless he reconciles." " Details perfect in unity, and 
contributing to a final purpose, are the sign of the 
production of a consummate master." This is surely 
a passage of singular difficulty. Truth to nature — the 
statement of no falsehood and the doing of no de~ 



'MODERN painters' — FIRST VOLUME. I 5 

structive violence — is an intelligible condition of the 
art whereof this is the apostolate : but detail ? Is 
detail, or explicit recognition of minor facts, really 
the " sign of the production of a consummate master " ? 
" Details contributing to a final purpose " seems to be 
a phrase permitting the ignoring of details that do 
not contribute. And what does the Impressionist ask 
more than this ? A powerful artist, says Ruskin in a 
previous sentence, " necessarily looks upon complete 
parts as the very sign of error, weakness, and ignor- 
ance." Once for all, this should answer the common 
and careless reading of Modern Painters and the rest. 

Leaving the question of detail, then, aside, or 
leaving it, if once for all is hardly possible, for a 
time, we shall do justice to Ruskin's teaching by 
choosing from his most dogmatic pages the following 
passages that bear upon the larger question of truth : — 

" When there are things in the foreground of 
Salvator, of which I cannot pronounce whether they 
be granite, or slate, or tufa, I affirm that there is in 
them neither harmonious union nor simple effect, but 
simple monstrosity. . . . The elements of brutes can 
only mix in corruption, the elements of inorganic 
nature only in annihilation. We may, if we choose, 
put together centaur monsters : but they must still be 
half man, half horse ; they cannot be both man and 
horse, nor either man or horse." 

And this : — 

"That only should be considered a picture in which 
the spirit, not the materials, observe, but the animating 



l6 JOHN RUSKIN. 

emotion, of many . . . studies is concentrated and ex- 
hibited by tlie aid of long-studied, painfully chosen 
forms ; idealised in the right sense of the word, not by 
audacious liberty of that faculty of degrading God's 
works which man calls his 'imagination,' but by perfect 
assertion of entire knowledge . . . wrought out with 
that noblest industry which concentrates profusion into 
point, and transforms accumulation into structure. . . . 
There is . . . more ideality in a great artist's selection 
and treatment of roadside weeds and brook-worn pebbles 
than in all the struggling caricature of the meaner mind, 
which heaps its foreground with colossal columns, and 
heaves impossible mountains into the encumbered sky." 

Those columns and those mountains get no respect 
from any one at present, but it must not be forgotten 
that the book before us was in part written to over- 
throw them. 

All this is from the later-written preface. We come 
next to Modern Painters, Part I. Section i, the earliest 
important page of one of the greatest authors of our 
incomparable literature. It is a laborious page, in 
great part filled by one sentence explaining that public 
opinion can hardly be right upon matters of art until, 
with the lapse of time, it shall have accepted guidance. 
The same chapter declares war explicitly upon the " old 
masters " in landscape, and the reader has to add to the 
names of Salvator Rosa, Caspar Poussin, and Claude, 
those of Cuyp, Berghem, Both, Ruysdael, Hobbema, 
Teniers (in landscape), Paul Potter, Canaletto, " and 
the various Van somethings and Back somethings, more 
especially and malignantly those who have libelled the 



'MODERN TAINTERS' — FIRST VOLUME. 1/ 

sea." In the chapter, soon following, "On Ideals of 
Power," is to be especially noted the just thought : — 

" It is falsely said of great men that they waste their 
lofty powers on unworthy objects. The object . . . 
cannot be unworthy of the power which it brings into 
exertion, because nothing can be accomplished by a 
greater power which can be accomplished by a less 
any more than bodily strength can be exerted where 
there is nothing to resist it. . . . Be it remembered, 
then. Power is never wasted." 

(Ruskin, at this time and ever after, used " which ^ 
where " that " would be both more correct and less 
inelegant. He probably had the habit from him who 
did more than any other to disorganise the English 
language — that is. Gibbon.) 

The chapter on " Imitation " is in part addressed to 
the correction of a half-educated pleasure, since then 
generally relinquished even by the half-educated, and 
even in the case of popular pictures. Amid much 
that is less valuable, the reader finds this obvious 
but excellent distinction : — 

" A marble figure docs not look like what it is not : 
it looks like marble, and like the form of a man. It 
does not look like a man, which it is not, but like the 
form of a man, which it is. . . . The chalk outline of 
the bough of a tree on paper is not an imitation ; it 
looks like chalk and paper — not like wood, and that 
which it suggests to the mind is not properly said to be 
like the form of a bough, it is the form of a bough." 

The contrast is, of course, with work in colour, and 
it is finely made, with the conclusion, for all the arts 

B 



l8 JOHN RUSKIN. 

alike, " Ideas of truth are the foundation, and ideas of 
imitation the destruction, of art." On the chapter " Of 
Ideas of Relation " the criticism of thirty years ago, led 
by France on the initiative of Theophile Gautier, and 
generally proclaimed by a generation now nearly dis- 
possessed, joined issue with Ruskin. He teaches that 
art has its highest exercise in "the invention of such 
incidents and thoughts as can be expressed in words as 
well as on canvas, and are totally independent of any 
means of art but such as may serve for the bare sugges- 
tion of them." Let me give the instance cited in the 
text : — 

" The principal object in the foreground of Turner's 
' Building of Carthage ' is a group of children sailing toy 
boats. The exquisite choice of this incident, as express- 
ive of the ruling passion which was to be the source of 
future greatness, in preference to the tumult of busy 
stonemasons or arming soldiers, is quite as appreciable 
when it is told as when it is seen, — it has nothing to do 
with the technical difficulties of painting : a scratch of 
the pen would have conveyed the idea. . . . Claude, in 
subjects of the same kind, commonly introduces people 
carrying red trunks with iron locks about ; . . . the 
intellect can have no occupation here ; we must look 
to the imitation or to nothing. Consequently, Turner 
rises above Claude in the very instant of the conception 
of his picture." 

Are we really required to connect this foreground in- 
cident essentially with the " conception " of Turner's 
picture? And how about Turner's pictures wherein 
no such unlandscape-like accessory occurs ? 



'MODERN painters' — FIRST VOLUME. I9 

Ruskin was, it is evident in a score of places, no 
musician. How should a musician consent to the 
judgment that his art should do its highest and most 
musicianly work in uttering thoughts that another art 
might have served ? Is not an absolute melody, or an 
absolute musical phrase, or a harmony — Batii, batti, 
the opening notes of Parsifal, Tins is My Body from 
Bach's St Matthew, or the chords of Purcell's Winter — ■ 
aloof — not far, but different — from the several worlds 
of the other arts? The man who has not music in his 
soul may perhaps be a man debarred from thought 
that is not, in some sense, literature ; the other arts, 
albeit distinct enough, may not have the power that 
music has to prove the distinction in the ear that is 
able to hear. Therefore he who has not the ear lacks 
the strongest of the proofs that the arts are not inter- 
changeable. The able eye will not do so much. To 
advance such a conjecture here may be something like 
presumption, but it is intended to explain one of the 
few faults or weak places in the great body of doctrine 
of Modern Painters. The least thoughtful reader has 
by rote the accusation against Ruskin that his teaching 
on art abounds in errors and "inconsistencies." The 
present writer finds no such abundance of faults in 
the great argument. There, however, is one. 

From the chapter on " Ideas of Power " may be 
cited the admirable explanation of the conviction of 
power produced in all minds, ignorant and educated, 
by the "sketch," or by the beginning. "The first 



20 JOHN RUSKIN. 

five chalk touches bring a head into existence out 
of nothing. No five touches in the wliole course of 
the work will ever do so much as these." Towards 
completion the decrease of respective effect continues. 
We ought not, Ruskin tells us, to prefer this sensation 
of power to the intellectual estimate of power that 
comes as the work is developed. Those who take, 
without the necessary care for precise meanings, what 
he has said elsewhere against Michelangiolo should 
check their own exaggeration by the sentence in 
which he judges that master to be the only father of 
art from whose work we get both the sensation and 
the intellectual estimate of power, and equally. The 
chapter " Of Ideas of Truth " entangles us once again 
in the intricacies of this argument. " No falsehood," 
it assures us, was ever beautiful. But granting that 
the beautiful centaur is not in this subtle sense a 
falsehood, does the same dispensation hold good in 
the case of a brown shadow — a fictitious brown 
shadow, even — cast upon a twilight road in order that 
a bright cloud may be seen to shine? The painter 
has not nature's materials wherewith to make his 
picture match hers ; and that her foreground is light 
whilst yet her cloud shines does not make the same 
relation possible to man, who does not hold the pencils 
of light. Truth as it is in a paint-box can be but rela- 
tive. This is the obvious protest of every reader. Nay, 
does not Ruskin himself justify Rubens, who — out of 
gaiety and vitality of heart and not because of awful 



'MODERN PAINTERS' — FIRST VOLUME. 21 

devotion to one beautiful and hardly accessible thing, 
like the luminosity of a cloud — puts the sun in one 
part of the sky and draws the sunbeams from another, 
and, again, casts shadows at right angles to the light ? 
" Bold and frank licences " he names these — no worse ; 
albeit with this fine warning : " The young artist must 
keep in mind that the painter's greatness consists not 
in his taking, but in his atoning for, them." It remains 
for him who would enter into the matter to follow the 
argument of Modern Painters as its author presents 
it, and as no summary comment is able to represent 
it. Let it only be added here that the reason Ruskin 
gives for the abhorrence of " falsehood " — that nature 
is immeasurably superior to all that the human mind 
can conceive — seems to be precisely a reason why man 
might be content with one or two truths at a time 
and reverently glad of the means (fictitious shadow 
amongst them) of securing the one or two ; not in 
disorganisation, but in the unity of, as it were, a 
dazzled pictorial vision, confessing its limitations by 
fewness, and its love of natural facts by closing with 
the few. If Turner was so supreme an artist as to 
have stolen that fire from heaven which is the light, 
why still there are painters who have not it and yet 
have not deserved to die. But to say so of Turner 
would be a mere trick of speech. Not even he had 
more than a paint-box ; but doubtless he was the most 
divine landscape painter that ever lived. And his 
great panegyrist magnifies him for the sake of that 



22 JOHN RUSKIN. 

natural truth whereof he writes : " To him who does 
not search it out it is darkness, as it is to him who 
does, infinity." 

The chapter on " The Relative Importance of Truths " 
intends to prove, "if it be not self-evident," that "gen- 
erality gives importance to the subject, and limitation 
or particularity to the predicate," and proves it by 
admirable reasoning. From "Truths of Colour" might 
be cited something difficult to reconcile with Ruskin's 
judgment elsewhere in favour of the Tuscan colourists 
(local-colourists, that is) and against the chiaroscurists, 
even Rembrandt. But here and in other places it 
is barely just to bear in mind the age of the writer 
of the first volume of Modern Painters, and the half 
century following during which he thought out in- 
cessantly the same themes. Wonderful was this mind 
of four - and - twenty : it would have been monstrous 
had it undergone none of the change that comes of 
mental experience, and of a pushing-on in the under- 
taken way. 

And this brings us to the end of the first seven 
chapters of this first volume — chapters of principles, 
which are applied with a large sweep of allusion to 
the works of all schools. When, in the course of 
this most interesting section, we find fidelity of detail 
again commended, let us remember that neglect of 
the spirit and truth as well as of the letter of natural 
things was characteristic of the English painters be- 
fore this book itself did so much to alter the manner 



'MODERN PAINTERS' — FIRST VOLUME. 23 

of our school. We are used now to the EngHsh 
landscape that is the " corrupt following " of this 
apostle, Ruskin, and is full of literal detail ; but it 
did not exist when Modern Painters was written. It 
was necessary to tell people accustomed to a brown 
tree and a tapering stem that Raphael, Titian, Ghir- 
landajo, and Perugino painted little mallows, straw- 
berries, and all wayside things with devotion and 
precision, that Masaccio drew a true mountain, that 
the Umbrians painted true skies, that Giotto traced 
the form of a rock, and the Venetians of a tree, in 
their right anatomy. It was insular then to be coarse 
and general ; and the teaching of detail was liberal 
education. The chapter on " Application " is remark- 
able for its generosity. Austere had been the principles 
in the setting forth, but the applications give abso- 
lution, I know not quite how consciously, assuredly 
not arbitrarily, but sometimes to the reader's wonder, 
seeing what has gone before. A noble convention is 
excused, and the passion of one man is acknowledged 
to be sudden and of another to be slow. It is rarely 
indeed that the application of the strenuous principles 
is made by Ruskin to condemn any man altogether, 
if that man have genius ; the final reference is to that ; 
pardon is for the great, and the court of judgment 
that grants it cannot publish its rules. The Dutch 
painters are unhouseled, and so is Domenichino. 
The work of that Bolognese is named by Ruskin not 
failure, but "perpetration and commission." The 



24 JOHN RUSKIN. 

painter of the second greatest picture in the world, 
as the connaisseur, during a century or two, held the 
" Communion of St Jerome " to be, is here declared 
"palpably incapable of doing anything good, great, 
or right." He who said this, studying Domenichino 
for himself, a student twenty-three years old or less, 
against the world, held a "consistency" and knew it. 
And, of course, the landscape painters already named 
— Caspar Poussin, Canaletto, and the rest — are un- 
forgiven. It is through a series of criticisms on the 
Royal Academy of the " Forties " that we come at last 
to the detail of the work of Turner. 

At the outset Ruskin traces the foundation of Turner's 
greatness in his painting of things intimate and long 
loved. The Yorkshire downs taught him, for instance, 
the masses of mountain drawing. With something that 
looks like rashness Ruskin says of any landscape painter 
that " if he attempt to impress on his landscapes any 
other spirit than that he has felt, and to make them 
the landscapes of other times, it is all over with him, 
at least in the degree in which such reflected moonshine 
takes the place of the genuine light of the present day." 
If in some other place such a judgment as this is 
to be reconciled with the praise of Turner's " Building 
of Carthage," it is not here. (That picture is, in effect, 
renounced later on, as, in colour, unworthy of the 
master.) Moreover, when a great exception is made 
to the general peril of taking inspirations from afar 
or from antiquity, in the fine phrase : " Nicola Pisano 



'MODERN painters' — FIRST VOLUME. 2$ 

got nothing but good, the modern French nothing but 
evil, from the study of the antique ; but Nicola Pisano 
had a God and a character " ; how is this to be taken 
as a warning by a student who is not a Frenchman and 
who has not abandoned the faith that he too has a 
God and a character? Yet it is spoken by Ruskin 
as a warning, nearly as a menace. The study of the 
dealing of Turner with France, Switzerland, and Italy, 
which follows, and of their dealings with his growing 
power, is an exquisite one, notwithstanding some cer- 
tain paradoxes — exquisite in regard to that beautiful 
and diverse Europe, and in regard to the genius. Rus- 
kin says, perhaps, too little rather than too much of 
the un-Italian spirit of the Italy of Turner's work : " I 
recollect no instance of Turner's drawing a cypress 
except in general terms." The man, I may add, who 
possessed not, among the many spirits of the woods, 
the special spirit of the cypress, assuredly could not 
spiritually paint the country of the hill-village, the belfry, 
the gold-white simple walls, the pure and remote sky 
pricked with delicate and upright forms on the hill- 
edge, the country of soft dust and of old colours, the 
country of poverty, which is Italy. An opulent and 
an elegant Italy of balustrades and gardens, and, if 
one may venture to say so, a country of the ideal 
past, seems to be Turner's. Of the poplars, of the 
rivers, of the large skies and the flat valleys of France, 
Turner became the son by singular sympathy. Ruskin 
describes the adoption in a brief and lovely passage 



26 JOHN RUSKIN. 

on the beauties of that domestic France. He tells 
us that Turner's rendering of Switzerland was gener- 
ally deficient, but this seems to be said rather on a 
theory, and we cannot forget the entire praise and 
wonder bestowed elsewhere on the drawings of Swiss 
and Savoyard mountains. 

The "changes introduced by Turner in the received 
system of art " shall be given in the words of AToderti 
Painters, the page being one of the most important in 
the work : — 

" It was impossible for him, with all his keen and 
long-disciplined perceptions, not to feel that the real 
colour of nature had never been attempted by any 
school ; and that though conventional representations 
had been given by the Venetians of sunlight and twi- 
light by invariably rendering the whites golden and the 
blues green, yet of the actual, joyous, pure, roseate hues 
of the external world no record had ever been given. 
He saw also that the finish and specific grandeur of 
nature had been given, but her fulness, space, and 
mystery, never ; and he saw that the great landscape- 
painters had always sunk the lower middle tints of 
nature in extreme shade, bringing the entire melody of 
colour as many degrees down as their possible light was 
inferior to nature's ; and that in so doing a gloomy 
principle had influenced them even in their choice of 
subject. For the conventional colour he substituted a 
pure straightforward rendering of fact, as far as was in 
his power ; and that not of such fact as had been before 
even suggested, but of all that is most brilliant, beautiful, 
and inimitable ; he went to the cataract for its iris, to 
the conflagration for its flames, asked of the sea its in- 
tensest azure, of the sky its clearest gold. For the 
limited space and defined forms of elder landscape he 



'MODERN PAINTERS' — FIRST VOLUME. 2/ 

substituted the quantity and the mystery of the vastest 
scenes of earth ; and for the subdued chiaroscuro he 
substituted first a balanced diminution of opposition 
throughout the scale, and afterwards . . . attempted to 
reverse the old principle, taking the lowest portion of 
the scale truly, and merging the upper part in high 
light. Innovations so daring and so various could not 
be introduced without corresponding peril ; the diffi- 
culties that lay in his way were more than any human 
intellect could altogether surmount." 



I will stop upon a detail of this passage, of which the 
whole technical significance is important, the diction 
being of great precision, to say that the reader ought 
to make himself master of all that Ruskin means by 
" the scale." Any man who has thought about any 
picture must be aware of " the scale," and must re- 
cognise its limited relations in painting as the source 
of a difficulty — or rather an impossibility — and as there- 
fore the justification of a convention : not an arbitrary 
convention, but a convention commanded, directed, and 
controlled by certain truths, and by certain beauties 
salient amongst those truths. And it is because Ruskin 
makes the most profound and the most searching con- 
fession — the best of all possible confessions — of the 
convention of relations whereof a painter has to make 
his picture, that a reader, even with all good will 
to be taught, may be doubtful, at the end, whether 
Modern Fahiters does in fact succeed in proving one 
way to be blessed and the other banned. But I repeat, 
this is to be studied at first hand from the book. And 



28 JOHN RUSKIN. 

the book, entering upon Section ii, does justice, once 
for all, to the painters of tone, even Salvator Rosa and 
Caspar Poussin, and to what they achieved, according 
to their scheme of relations. Albeit the chapter on 
" Tone " is one of the most technical, it is -one of the 
most interesting. In regard to Turner on this matter, 

" in his power of associating cold with warm light no 
one has ever approached or even ventured into the same 
field with him. The old masters, content with one 
simple tone, sacrificed to its unity all the exquisite 
gradations and varied touches of relief and change by 
which nature unites her hours with each other. They 
give the warmth of the sinking sun, overwhelming all 
things in its gold, but they do not give those grey 
passages about the horizon where, seen through its 
dying light, the cool and the gloom of night gather 
themselves for their victory." 

The chapter on " Colour" opens with a very famous 
page in which the Alban Mount, the Campagna, and 
La Riccia, fresh in the sun from a stormy shower, 
is compared with Caspar Poussin's landscape. Despite 
its beauty, and certainly because of some of its beauties, 
it cannot, I venture to think, take a classic place, and 
I have not extracted it. It is multitudinous as the 
scene it describes — the enormous and various scenery 
of the sky after storm, and that of the woods, the 
mountains, the plain, and the far sea. Not one vain 
or vacant or lifeless or superfluous word is to 
be found therein ; all is abundance, life, and sight, 
and the diction is as instant as it is pure. The effort 



'MODERN painters' — FIRST VOLUME. 29 

of this description, whereby, in the end, the reader 
is httle moved and yet a Uttle wearied, renews the 
obstinate question whether it may not be that so many 
of nature's wonders, as well as so many of a fine 
author's wonders, are too. many for one picture, one 
page. Not in arrogance, but in humility, might the 
painter detach one luminous truth of natural fact so 
that it might be the inspiration of his work, and that 
work be no portrait of inimitable things, but a beautiful 
thing of its own kind, owing its beauty to one beauty 
of nature's. It is true that to try for the organic all 
is more glorious ; the few, the one perhaps, did so by 
genius— Turner. But those who are less than Turner 
and have been taught that they ought to try for all 
have made bad pictures. And even this master of 
literature, trying for all in this splendid description, 
has not made a good page. 

It is in regard to this power over ntimcrous truth — - 
this most solitary power over nicmeroiis truth — that 
Ruskin says of the master : — 

"Turner, and Turner only, would follow, and render 
. . . that mystery of decided line, that distinct, sharp, 
visible, but unintelligible and inextricable richness, 
which, examined part by part, is to the eye nothing but 
confusion and defeat, which, taken as a whole, is all 
unity, symmetry, and truth." 

Ruskin shows us, in another place, how each of the 
touches of nature is unique and diverse, so that though 
we cannot tell what such or such a touch may be, yet 



30 TOHN RUSKIN. 

we know "it cannot be any thing"; while even the 
most dexterous distances of Salvator or Poussin " pre- 
tend to secrecy without having anything to conceal, and 
are ambiguous, not from the concentration of meaning, 
but from the want of it." This excellent sentence is 
from those greatly scientific chapters on " Truth of 
Colour," " Truth of Chiaroscuro," " Truth of Space " as 
dependent on the focus of the eye, wherein also we 
read that " Nature is never distinct and never vacant, 
. . . always mysterious, but always abundant ; you 
always see something, but you never see all " ; that the 
Italians were vacant, and the Dutch distinct, "Nature's 
rule being . . . ' you shall never be able to count the 
bricks, but you shall never see a dead wall ' " ; and 
that " Turner introduced a new era in landscape art by 
showing that the foreground might be sunk for the 
distance, and that it was possible to express immediate 
proximity to the spectator without giving anything like 
completeness to the forms of the near objects." This 
Turner accomplished, not by " slurred or soft lines 
(always the sign of vice in art), but by a decisive imper- 
fection, a firm, but partial, assertion of form, which the 
eye feels indeed to be close home to it, and yet cannot 
rest upon, nor cling to, nor entirely understand." And 
let the following passages be quoted from the chapters 
on " Colour " and " Shadow " before we pass to the 
chapters on "Skies" and "Mountains": "The ordinary 
tinsel and trash . . . with which the walls of our 
Academy are half covered ... is based on a system 



•modern painters' — FIRST VOLUME, 3 I 

of colour beside which Turner's is as Vesta to Cotytto 
— the chastity of fire to the foulness of earth." "There 
is scarcely an artist of the present day . . . who does 
not employ more pure and raw colour than Turner." 
Then follows the memorable judgment on colour : " I 
think that the first approach to viciousness of colour 
... is commonly indicated chiefly by a prevalence of 
purple and absence of yellow " ; for Ruskin makes us 
aware of the almost secret gold of fine colour. Rubens 
and Turner had, like nature, yellow and black as a 
"fundamental opposition." In the chapter "Of Truth 
of Chiaroscuro " Ruskin writes : — 

" If we have to express vivid light, our first aim must 
be to get the shadows sharp and visible ; and this is not 
to be done by blackness, . . . but by keeping them 
perfectly flat, keen, and even. A very pale shadow, if 
it be kept flat, if it conceal the details of the object it 
crosses, if it be grey and cold compared with their 
colour, and very sharp-edged, will be far more con- 
spicuous, and make everything out of it look a great 
deal more like sunlight than a shadow ten times its 
depth, shaded off at the edge, and confounded with the 
colour of the object on which it falls. Now the old 
masters of the Italian school . . . directly reverse the 
principle ; they blacken their shadows till the picture 
becomes quite appalling, and everything in it is invisible; 
but they make a point of losing their edges, and carrying 
them off by gradation." 

Turner will keep the shadows " clear and distinct, 
and make them felt as shadows, though they are so 
faint that, but for their decisive forms, we should not 



6^ 



JOHN RUSKIN. 



have observed them for darkness at all." Turner's 
shadows are, like nature's, shot with light. 

" Words are not accurate enough, nor delicate enough, 
to express or trace the constant, all-pervading influence 
of the finer and vaguer shadows throughout his works, 
that thrilling influence which gives to the light they leave 
its passion and its power." 

Three chapters record the study of the three regions 
of cloud — the "neglected upper sky" (neglected until 
Turner drew the cirrus), the middle cloud, and the rain- 
cloud. There is the noblest pleasure in the writer's 
confession that he has to find the same words in 
describing a toreground of nature's and a foreground of 
Turner's, and that delight is sensibly expressed in the 
paragraphs on the real and authentic skies, closing with 
Turner, who had more knowledge of all essential truth 
" in every wreath of vapour than composed the whole 
stock of heavenly information which lasted Cuyp and 
Claude their lives." Turner has infinity in forms of 
cloud, too mysterious — in wave of cloud and light — to 
be tested by the eye : infinity outsoaring the mere 
numbers achieved by lesser painters. " For . , . the 
greatest number is no nearer to infinity than the least, 
if it be definite number," while infinity is reached by 
the mere hints of the variety and obscurity of truth. 
This is in the upper heavens ; the lower heavens 
of the rain - cloud have been the material of nearly 
all the bad pictures in all the schools : the two 



'MODERN painters' — FIRST VOLUME. 33 

windy Caspar Poussins in our National Gallery, for 
example : — 

" Massive concretions of ink and indigo, wrung and 
twisted very hard, apparently in a vain effort to get 
some moisture out of them ; bearing up courageously 
and successfully against a wind whose effects on the 
trees in the foreground can be accounted for only on 
the supposition that they are all of the indiarubber 
species." 

But Ruskin gives some praise to modern artists — 
Cox and De Wint and Copley Fielding — " before we 
ascend the solitary throne." 

After the heavens come the heavenly mountains, 
whereof, at this early age, Ruskin had studied the 
whole organisation, to find it, with a rapture of re- 
cognition, confessed in the work of Turner and sug- 
gested in every lightest line. In these chapters the 
subject is less closely a piece of reasoning than in 
the hard, urgent, and busy first chapters, upon which 
I have dwelt at length because of their singular im- 
portance ; but the motive is still explanation, demon- 
stration ; the paragraph is hard at work, and only at 
the closes do we find the relaxation of beauty. In 
this book Ruskin does not precisely decorate his 
construction ; he rather adds ornament with a punctual 
afterthought, and it is doubtless these buoyant and 
conspicuous flowers of prose that took the eye of 
the public, and gained so much and so prompt ad- 
miration for Modern Painters. But throughout these 

c 



34 JOHN RUSKIN. 

chapters the sense of vitaUty increases. It is as though 
the searching grasp upon the essential history, law, 
and spirit of things gave him a natural security, so 
that rising from the past of the streams, the origin of 
the clouds, and the roots of the mountains, his in- 
telligence is, as it were, bound to understand or 
conceive no other ranges of hills or clouds than those 
which are lifted on the earth and in the skies according 
to inevitable law. That is, the mountains of Salvator 
Rosa may have, as he says, " holes in them but no 
valleys ; protuberances and excrescences, but no parts " ; 
but Ruskin, student of the profound nature of the rocks, 
shows us authentic valleys, and knows the parts of the 
mountains as fragments of the unity of the earth. In 
the beautiful chapter " Of the Foreground," it is worth 
noting, occurs a brief phrase characteristic of the prose 
— a derogation not so much from Johnson as from 
Gibbon — that was the common language of letters, the 
refuse of an English style, profusely ready to the hand 
of every writer in the middle of the century, and en- 
cumbered the way even of one who was to purge the 
refuse from so many kinds of floors : — 

"A steep bank of loose earth . . . exposed to the 
weather, contains in it . . . features capable of giving 
high gratification to a careful observer." 

As a suggestion of the study of organic simplicity 
this fine chapter on foreground is rich in a sense of 
drawing which the reader takes from the strong fingers 



'MODERN TAINTERS' — FIRST VOLUME. 35 

of the writer. Capable of this hold upon the forms, 
the growth, the perspectives, the floor of the world, 
and the ranks of all erections, that hand could cer- 
tainly not refrain from the gesture of contempt before 
the foregrounds of Salvator Rosa, all emphatic and 
all inorganic. With indignation and wit their condem- 
nation is flicked at them in twenty examples. But in 
the following chapters " Of Truth of Water," there 
is of course less of organic design and more of the 
painter's vision of inorganic and various unity, except 
in the pages tliat treat, with a mathematical calculation, 
of reflections. This section of his work, Ruskin tells 
us, he approached despondently, because, whilst he 
could understand why men admired Salvator's rocks, 
Claude's foregrounds, Hobbema's trees, and whilst he 
perceived in these things " a root which seems right 
and legitimate," he knew not what the sea of nature 
could be in the eyes of men who admired the seas 
of Backhuysen. 

It is curious to see how in this essay on the painting 
of waters the faith in the perfectibility — I wish I knew 
a word to express rather the capability-of-perpetual- 
progress-in-a-direction-of-perfection ; let me take perfecti- 
bility with that meaning — how the faith in this energy 
and single direction of human things, which inspires 
Ruskin's political economy, mountain drawing, and 
foreground painting, and compels him to work for 
the replies to unanswerable questions, renders him ill- 
satisfied with the simple and single painting of calm 



36 JOHN RUSKIN. 

waters, which painters of moderate powers are able to 
do artistically, giving keen pleasure thereby, but giving 
it easily, and urges him to study rather the painting 
of the broken sea, the shifting surface, and the 
cataract. The question arises in the reader's mind 
yet again whether this noble teaching, which would, 
if it were possible, make another Turner, has not in 
fact made, in the lower places, many bad painters. 
And yet his refutation of the bad painters of a quite 
different kind — those whom his teaching did not make 
and could not make — and his immediate appeal to 
the nature they disintegrated by the shattering effect 
of their negligence and the insolence of their recon- 
struction, are true master's work in this section on 
the sea, and in that which follows, on vegetation. 
Such is the lesson on the passage of the cataract 
from the spring to the fall, when the parabolic curve 
ceases, whereas the false painters carry that curve to 
the end, and make their water look active where it 
should be wildly subject to gravitation. Such is the 
study of the waves seen, from the sea shoreward, not 
as successive breakers, but as the self- same water 
repeating its crash with the perturbed spirit of the 
sea. Such also is the study of the top of the nodding 
wave when "the water swings and jumps along the 
ridge like a shaken chain." Such is the history of the 
growth of a tree, and the statement of the laws of its 
delimitation of outline, and of its angles, which the 
wildest wind that ever blew on earth cannot take out, 



'modern painters' — FIRST VOLUME. 37 

though from a twig but an inch thick, whereas Caspar 
Poussin's wind stretches the branches in curves. Of 
his sea-chapter, Ruskin himself says in a note : " It is 
a good study of wild weather ; but utterly feeble in 
comparison to the few words by which any of the great 
poets will describe sea. . . . There is nothing in 
sea description, detailed, like Dickens's storm in ' David 
Copperfield.' " 

In this book, as in others, Ruskin (perhaps, as I 
have suggested, for lack of music, and in default, 
therefore, of a sense of the separateness of an art 
that imitates nothing) spends the riches of his mind 
upon the perpetual, and in some kind insoluble, question 
as to the imitation and selection of nature in painting. 
Upon this he has said many things — contending 
things as even a careful student may hold, contrary 
things as the careless will continue to think. May 
we not regret the arduous thought spent upon an 
ambiguous dispute that is nearly an ambiguous quarrel ? 
If he had been learned in music, an art wherein such 
c )ntention finds no place, would he have made it the 
centre of his argument on painting ? 



38 



CHAPTER III. 

•MODERN PAINTERS.' 
THE SECOND VOLUME (1846). 

"The Second Volume of Modern Fainkrs which, 
though in affected language, yet with sincere and very 
deep feeling, expresses the first and fundamental law 
respecting human contemplation of the natural pheno- 
mena under whose influence we exist — that they can 
only be seen with their properly belonging joy and 
interpreted up to the measure of proper human intel- 
ligence, when they are accepted as the work and the 
gift of a Living Spirit greater than our own " — so 
runs Ruskin's description of this book. It passes to 
the study of the Theoretic Faculty, and teaches us to 
account for the beauty we are formed to perceive by 
referring it to the attributes of God. In front of this 
essay stands a moral apology for art, as accessory to 
the " human dignity and heavenward duty " of man- 
kind, informing the spirit of the artist by " the incor- 
ruptible and earnest pride which no applause, no 



'MODERN PAINTERS' — SECOND VOLUME. 39 

reprobation, can blind to its shortcomings, or beguile 
of its hope." Spirituality and morality have done ill 
to forego their divine claim to that art whereto they 
had a right not only of authority but of very origin 
and essence. And in the literally divine gift of art 
is implied the responsibility of choice, so that men 
are bound to authentic and incorrupt beauty in art 
as they are bound to justice in action. The happiness 
which the senses and their spirit take in the good 
which they contemplate and follow is itself, by its 
very energy, a sure rule of choice ; " it clasps what it 
loves so hard, that it crushes it if it be hollow." And 
this happiness, far too high to be called "aesthetic," 
Ruskin names the Theoretic Faculty. 

" We must advance, as we live on, from what is 
brilliant to what is pure, and from what is promised 
to what is fulfilled, and from what is our strength to 
what is our crown, only observing in all things how 
that which is indeed wrong, and to be cut up from 
the root, is dislike [of natural things] and not affection." 

Beauty is "the bread of the soul," for which virginal 
hunger is renewed every morning. And good genius 
was infallibly imaginative in the days before men had 
" begun to bring to the cross foot their systems instead 
of their sorrow," From this noble doctrine to the 
conclusion that a false and impious man could not 
be a great imaginative painter (a judgment that has 
been cast in Ruskin's teeth a thousand times), the logic 
of a young man carried him, not in haste indeed but 



40 JOHN RUSKIN. 

with the current of deUberate and intentional decision. 
"I do not think," said Socrates, "that any one who 
should now hear us, even though he were a comic 
poet, would say that I talk idly or discourse on 
matters that concern me not " ; but the comic, or more 
properly the derisive, humour of English writers has 
not forborne to accuse Ruskin of that which Socrates 
had confidence would be forborne in his own regard : 
to charge with vanity an inquiry that concerned man 
and the honour of his works. And if the question 
has been held so vain, what common contempt has 
not mocked the answer framed in the too instant need 
that a great mind had to be satisfied ! 

In preparation of his task of referring what we see 
to be beautiful to what we believe to be Eternal, 
Ruskin stays upon the old speculation as to the nature 
of the beauty that so delights our discerning senses 
as to cause us to refer the felicity to qualities of God. 
Among attempted " definitions " of beauty (which are 
descriptions rather than definitions) he does not cite 
the scholastic sentence " Splendour of Truth," which 
would have pleased him had he known it, but which 
does not explain why the aspect of truth is only some- 
times splendid ; he does quote the vaguer " kind of 
felicity" of Bacon, which fails to explain the kind. 
" Nothing is more common," Ruskin says in the following 
volume, " than to hear people who desire to be thought 
philosophical, declare that ' beauty is truth ' and ' truth 
is beauty.' I would most earnestly beg every sensible 



'MODERN painters' — SECOND VOLUME. 4I 

person who hears such an assertion made, to nip the 
germinating philosopher in his ambiguous bud ; and 
beg him, if he really believes his own assertion, never 
henceforward to use two words for the same thing." 
The succeeding chapters on "Unity," "Infinity," "Re- 
pose," " Moderation," are masterly in thought, with 
passages close and fine, as that which discovers the 
"reason of the agreeableness " of a curve — that it 
" divides itself infinitely by its changes of direction " ; 
that which asserts " the inseparable dependence " of 
spirits on each other's being, and their "essential and 
perfect depending on their Creator's " ; and the noble 
page on " Unity " : Subjectional Unity of things sub- 
mitted to the same influence, which is that of clouds 
in the wind ; Unity of Origin, which is that of branches 
of a tree ; Unity of Sequence, which is that of continued 
lines or the notes following to make a melody ; and 
Unity of Membership, " which is the unity of things 
separately imperfect in a perfect whole," as in the notes 
joining to make a harmony, and, in spiritual creatures, 
their essential life of happiness in the Creator Spirit. 
Inordinate variety (such as that of the colouring of 
some tropical birds) is a defect of the beauty of Unity. 
The dark background is presented to us (and here 
Ruskin seems perilously to strain a principle in the 
application) as a denial of the beauty of Infinity. 

" I think if there be any one grand division, by 
which it is at all possible to set the productions of 
painting, so far as their mere plan or system is con- 



42 JOHN RUSKIN. 

cerned, on our right and left hands, it is this of light 
and dark background, of heaven light or of object 
light." 

The abruptness and confidence of the theological 
assertions, Ruskin protests in a note, became painful 
to him in after years, but their matter is involved in 
every thought of this essay. Nothing else is retracted 
in the revision except something of the veneration given 
to Michelangiolo, of the love given to Raphael and to 
Francia, and of a young man's love of the forest and 
the wild landscape, in impatience of the lovely country 
of agriculture. 

The latter part of the second volume is principally a 
treatise on " Imagination" — Associative, Penetrative, and 
Contemplative — a great work of true intellectual pas- 
sion ; and the poverty of any words that try to present 
the argument by way of mere sketch must discourage 
me from the attempt : howbeit the task I have set 
myself throughout is no less than this almost impossible 
summary, the reader will do well to be more than ever 
on his guard in order to take the citations as signs and 
fragments of the perfect life of the work. Let it be said 
at once that no man could think out the multitude of 
truths without the use of opposing phrases. It would 
have been well if in the subsequent revision for later 
issues (especially the thorough revision of 1883) Ruskin 
had altered the mere diction of the doctrine as to 
choice in art. The reader must be warned not to put 
this amongst the reputed " inconsistencies " until he has 



'MODERN PAINTERS — SECOND VOLUME. 43 

read the fourth volume, where the paradox is explained. 
The real " inconsistencies " are few, and only a reader 
baffled by the consistency (and there is nothing so 
exacting, so difficult, so various, as the consistency of a 
complete theory, nothing so overwhelming to a slothful 
student) has ever diverted himself by counting them. 
At the outset Ruskin encounters — by another of those 
originally paltry accidents that are of use — the definition 
of Imagination by Dugald Stewart, who does not know 
imagination from composition, or recomposition, and 
thinks imagination in landscape to consist in the im- 
aginary landscape of gathering or collocation. It is 
not this, as no one needs to be told to-day, but we 
owe our knowledge in great part to Ruskin's contention ; 
and the word imagination itself (originally "esthetic," 
or sensual, and defective) is what it is now by his'' 
own act of transformation. Imagination does not com- 
bine, but is pre-engaged upon more vital work. In 
fact, the chapter on Imagination Associative does some 
of its most effectual work in its witty history of the 
drawing of a tree by a painter without imagination. 

" We will suppose him, for better illustration of the 
point in question, to have good feeling and correct 
knowledge of the nature of trees. He probably lays on 
his paper such a general form as he knows to be charac- 
teristic of the tree to be drawn, and such as he believes 
will fall in agreeably with the other masses of his picture. 
. . . When this form is set down, he assuredly finds it 
has done something he did not intend it to do. It has 
mimicked some prominent line, or overpowered some 



44 JOHN RUSKIN. 

necessary mass. He begins pruning and changing, and, 
after several experiments, succeeds in obtaining a form 
which does no material mischief to any other. To this 
form he proceeds to attach a trunk, and, working prob- 
ably on a received notion or rule (for the unimaginative 
painter never works without a principle) that tree-tr,;nks 
ought to lean first one way and then the other as they 
go up, and ought not to stand under the middle of the 
tree, he sketches a serpentine form of requisite pro- 
priety ; when it has gone up far enough — that is, till it 
looks disagreeably long, he will begin to ramify it ; and 
if there be another tree in the picture with two large 
branches, he knows that this, by all the laws of com- 
position, ought to have three or four, or some different 
number ; and because he knows that if three or four 
branches start from the same point they will look formal, 
therefore he makes them start from points one above 
another ; and because equal distances are improper, 
therefore they shall start at unequal distances. When 
they are fairly started, he knows they must undulate or 
go backwards and forwards, which accordingly he makes 
them do at random ; and because he knows that all 
forms ought to be contrasted, he makes one bend down 
while the other three go up. The three that go up, 
he knows, must not go up without interfering with each 
other, and so he makes two of them cross. He thinks 
it also proper that there should be variety of character 
in them ; so he makes the one that bends down graceful 
and flexible, and, of the two that cross, he splinters one 
and makes a stump of it. He repeats the process 
among the more complicated minor boughs, until, coming 
to the smallest, he thinks further care unnecessary, but 
draws them freely, and by chance. Having to put on 
the foliage, he will make it flow properly in the direction 
of the tree's growth ; he will make all the extremities 
graceful, but will be tormented by finding them come all 
aUke, and at last will be obliged to spoil a number of 



'MODERN painters' — SECOND VOLUME. 45 

them altogether in order to obtain opposition. They 
will not, however, be united in this their spoliation, but 
will remain uncomfortably separate and individually ill- 
tempered. He consoles himself by the reflection that 
it is unnatural for all of them to be equally perfect. 
Now, I suppose that through the whole of this process 
he has been able to refer to his definite memory or 
conception of nature for every one of the fragments 
he has successively added." 

Ruskin's own tree-drawing — stem-drawing especially — 
has an extraordinary power ; so has his word, living 
with the life of the tree, as when he tells you of the 
lower bough stretched towards you with somewhat 
of the action of an open hand, palm upwards, and 
the fingers a little bent. 

The penetrative form of the imaginative faculty, he 
tells us, is proved in its dealing with matter and with 
spirit. It takes a grasp of things by the heart, seizes 
outward things from within, and refers them " to that 
inner secret spring of which the hold is never lost" 
by ^schylus, Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare. " How 
did Shakespeare know that Virgiha could not speak ? " 
Contemplative imagination is Shelley's faculty ; in 
painting, it presents the generic or symbolical form of 
things capable of various accidents ; and no fidelity 
of surface imitation, such as Landseer's, can atone for 
the loss of the larger relations — of light or colour, 
for example — brought about by lack of imaginative 
vision. Contemplative imagination is able, having 
climbed the sycamore, and waiting, to perceive "the 



46 JOHN RUSKIN. 

Divine form among the mortal crowd " ; how much 
n\ore it knows in the breaking of bread cannot be 
told. " Though we cannot, while we feel deeply, 
reason shrewdly, yet I doubt if, except when we feel 
deeply, we can ever comprehend fully." (One wishes 
it were lawful, in quoting, to leave out such a futile 
word as the "ever" in this sentence.) And the in- 
tellect is said to sit, in the hour of imagination, upon 
" its central throne." Incidentally we have this keen 
point made of one of the differences of imagination 
and fancy: fancy is sequent and — mobile herself — 
deals with the mobility (I suppose mobility rather 
than action, wherewith imagination is mightily con- 
cerned) of things \ and perhaps I may add that Keats 
judged more wisely than he knew of the rather 
common fancy occupying him for the moment when 

he wrote — 

" Ever let the fancy roam ; 
Pleasure never is at home." 

Doubtless imaginative joy is everywhere supremely at 
home. " For the moment," 1 say — for the brief mo- 
ment ; contemplative imagination is in Keats in large 
and intense perfection. 

" Ideal " and " Real " are words that represent 
another subject of old thought whereon most men 
have opinions. Let me say briefly (since this may 
now be said more briefly than when Ruskin said it) 
that the doctrine of Modern Painters would have us 
to condemn that generalising which is a combination, 



'MODERN painters' — SECOND VOLUME. 47 

an assembling of individual characters, and is im- 
potent ; and that it would have us to seek the ideal 
of each individual, by the mental study of the hiero- 
glyphics of his sacred history, and by the hard working 
portraiture, " the necessary and sterling basis of all 
ideal art," practised by Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto, 
Ghirlandajo, Masaccio, John Bellini ; and not by 
Guido or the Caracci. The lack of the individual 
ideal, with the triviality of accessories, has filled the 
English Academy "with such a school of portraiture 
as must make the people of the nineteenth century 
the shame of their descendants, and the butt of all 
time." In treating of the vital and ideal beauty of 
man, Ruskin says that the purity of flesh-painting de- 
pends on the intensity and warmth of its colour. 

The second volume, finally, is very distinctly, and 
indeed suddenly, patched with the style of Hooker, 
whom Ruskin had studied with full imitative in- 
tention. But the normal and working style is purely 
of its own day as his genius renewed the day and 
the hour — that is, it is fresh, full - charged, and exact ; 
and as unlike anything in the past ages as it is unlike 
the more hesitating, gradated, and reinforced propriety 
learned by some later English from some later French 
writers. 



48 



CHAPTER IV. 

•MODERN PAINTERS.' 
THE THIRD AND FOURTH VOLUMES (1856). 

The third volume was written after ten years. Turner 
had died too soon to receive the amends of the first 
volume for the rash blame that had embittered his 
life ; and from the irreparable cruelty Ruskin's heart 
had taken the wound that the young heart accepts from 
the world : but there were, in their measure, men whom 
it was not too late to praise, and the generous fear 
lest one or two true painters should be denied their 
due until they also had passed from the communion 
of men upon earth led Ruskin somewhat far in his 
praises of modern painters who were not Turners. 
As a prelude stands an essay " Touching the Grand 
Style," in controversy with Sir Joshua Reynolds and 
with Dr Johnson, his ally. It is with no irreverence 
towards the master whose painting was a refutation of 
everything shallow that he took in hand to speak or 
read, and with no irreverence to Johnson, that a 



'MODERN painters'— THIRD VOLUME. 49 

reader, fresh from the searching thought of Ruskin, 
confesses the Discourse here examined to be an 
instance of the commonplace thinking of the eigh- 
teenth century — commonplace (let the paradox be 
allowed) to the degree of falsity. Loose reasoning 
in exact English is here, as where Sir Joshua sa)s 
that the Grand Style of Michelangiolo, "the Homer 
of painting," " has the least of common nature," 
whereas it is common and general nature that Sir 
Joshua's doctrine of the Grand Style does logically 
allow, and the distinction of individual character that 
it forbids. If the comparison with Homer were a 
just one, then the heroic or impossible in art must 
be mingled (as Ruskin proves) with the very un- 
heroic and quite possible, — with details of cookery, 
amongst others ; and having shown the figure of his 
hero, the painter ought to " spend the greater part 
of his time (as Homer the greater number of his 
verses) in elaborating the pattern on his shield." 
Moreover Sir Joshua and the Doctor think they have 
profoundly shaken the original idea of beauty by the 
eighteenth - century device of explaining beauty by 
custom. " If the whole world," they say, " should 
agree that Yes and No should change their mean- 
ings, Yes would then deny and No would affirm." 
As though the arbitrary sign of a word had any but 
a conventional relation to the thing signified ; and 
as though the Yes answered to the question " Do 
two and two make four ? " could be changed for 



50 JOHN RUSKIN. 

No in its significance, even if the sound of it were 
No! 

In regard to dignity Ruskin says : — 

" Paul Veronese opposes the dwarf to the soldier, 
and the negress to the queen ; Shakespeare places 
Caliban beside Miranda and Autolycus beside Perdita ; 
but the vulgar idealist withdraws his beauty to the safety 
of the saloon, and his innocence to the seclusion of 
the cloister, ... he has neither courage to front the 
monster, nor wit enough to furnish the knave." 

Ruskin finds the great style to be the style of a 
great painter, and knows that no good will can bring it 
to pass. The reader may remember that it is written 
in the F/uvdo, "There are, say those who preside at 
the mysteries, many wand-bearers, but few inspired." 

The recurrence of the dispute as to detail, if ever 
to be lamented, is hardly so in this third volume, 
wherein it produces some memorable sayings ; for 
example, that touches, seeming coarse when near the 
eye, are put on by a fine painter with the calculation 
wherewith an archer draws his bow — according to the 
distance, " the spectator seeing nothing but the strain 
of the strong arm " ; and that " the best drawing involves 
a ivonderful perception and expression of indistinctness." 
But alas ! how shall I attain to know, in two pictures, 
the indistinctness that is merely indistinctness from 
that which is wonderfully perceived to be indistinct ? 
If, a little further, we must submit to have it said of 
the tender Rembrandt that he sacrifices to one light 
and its relations " the expression of every character . . , 



'MODERN PAINTERS '—THIRD VOLUME. 5 I 

which depends on tenderness of shape or tint," we 
submit for the pleasure of reading, in contrast, of 
Veronese's "delicate air" and "great system of spacious 
truth." 

" He unites all ... in tenderest balance, noting 
in each hair's- breadth of colour, not merely what its 
rightness or wrongness is in itself, but what its relation 
is ... ; restraining, for truth's sake, his exhaustless 
energy, reining back, for truth's sake, his fiery stren^h ; 
veiling, before truth, the vanity of brightness ; pene- 
trating, for truth, the discouragement of gloom." 

After the true and the false " Grand Styles " come 
considerations of true and false ideals ; and I take 
from a page on the latter this witty passage : — 

" A modern German, without invention, . . . seeing ^ f O Q 
a rapid in a river, will immediately devote the remainder 
of the day to the composition of dialogues between 
amorous water nymphs and unhappy mariners ; while 
the man of true invention, power, and sense will, instead, 
set himself to consider whether the rocks in the river 
could have their points knocked off, or the boats upon 
it be made with stronger bottoms. . . . The various 
forms of false idealism have so entangled the modern 
mind, often called, I suppose ironically, practical." 

Compare with this the permission given, two pages later, 

to the true imagination to create for itself "fairies and '^^^^ ^>^ 

naiads, and other such fictitious creatures." How shall 

the reader be taught to feel, with Ruskin, an infallible 

moral indignation against this naiad and an infallible 

moral delight in that? It seems to me impossible. 

One falls back upon the sure if inexplicable private 



52 JOHN RUSKIN. 

judgment: "this ideal poem is genius -work and 
beautiful, and that ideal poem is not." But in con- 
fessing despair of learning the lesson as a lesson (it is 
taught, with all power, purpose, and insistance, by 
Ruskin, as a lesson), I disclaim the insolence of re- 
proaching him with that moral passion which was to 
his mind most intelligible, most necessary, and angelic- 
ally just. 

" Purist Idealism," " Naturalist Idealism," and " Gro- 
tesque Idealism " in their right forms are studied next, 
with some repetition, but also with almost overwhelming 
variety. Ruskin adds to his words on the authentic 
imagination these, which, when they are heard, confer 
the vision and the power : " Write the things which 
thou hast seen, and the things which are." To the 
imagination he commits the study of general things, 
of special things, and of unique things in their mul- 
titudes. "The choice as well as the vision is mani- 
fested to Homer," he says in another place, touching on 
the controversy that runs throughout. In a passage 
which has truth in a most strange aspect, he avers that 
without choice a great painter may paint vain and paltry 
things "at a sorrowful level, somewhat above vulgarity. 
It is only when the minor painter takes them on his 
easel that they become things for the universe to be 
ashamed of." The chapter on the Grotesque is alto- 
gether delightful and wonderful. Grotesque art is that 
which " arises from healthful but irrational play of the 
imagination, or from irregular and accidental contem- 



'MODI'.RN painters' — THIRD VOLUME. 53 

plation of terrible things, or from the confusion of the 
imagination by the presence of truths which it cannot 
wholly grasp " ; in the last case it is " altogether noble." 

" How is it to be distinguished from the false and 
vicious grotesque which results from idleness instead of 
noble rest ; from malice, instead of the solemn contem- 
plation of the necessary evil ; and from general degra- 
dation of the human spirit, instead of its subjection, or 
confusion, by thoughts too high for it ? " 

Ruskin admits that " the vague and foolish incon- 
sistencies of undisciplined dream " might be mistaken 
for " the compelled inconsistencies of thought " ; and 
he teaches us the difference in one of the best, most 
unmistakable, most imaginative, and most conclusive 
of all the lessons in his books — that of the two griffins. 
The drawings of the Roman griffin, from the temple of 
Antoninus and Faustina, and of the Lombard griffin, 
from the Cathedral of Verona, are by his own hand. 
The " classical " griffin has technical mastery of com- 
position, collocation, combination — the secondary quali- 
ties in no little beauty, but Ruskin takes the man who 
wrought it through the experiment and piecemeal of his 
work as but now he took a bad draughtsman through 
his tree — with exquisite dramatic sense of the man's 
mind and action, most wittily, with a wit of the very 
fingers. He shows how the lion and the eagle, put 
together, have been missed in the winged creature with 
its trivial eye, and its foot on the top of a flower. Let 
the reader remember that this griffin was famous, and 



54 JOHN' RUSKIN. 

that no one had perceived the Lombardic griffin until 
Ruskin studied him. No piecemeal is in this winged 
creature. " He is not merely a bit of lion and a bit of 
eagle, but whole lion incorporate with whole eagle." 
He has the carnivorous teeth, "and the pecuHar hang- 
ing of the jaw at the back, which marks the flexible 
mouth " ; he has no cocked ears, like the other, to 
catch the wind in flight (Ruskin says that the classical 
griffin would have an ear-ache when he "got home" — 
a phrase of "heart-easing mirth ") ; he — the Lombard — 
has the throat, the strength, the indolence of the lion : 
" he has merely got a poisonous winged dragon to hold, 
and for such a little matter as that, he may as well do 
it lying down." With the utmost dramatic sense is the 
grasp on the dragon told in this fine page, to which the 
reader is bound to have recourse if he would know true 
griffinism at all. " Composing legalism does nothing 
else than err." The passionate imagination knows not 
how to transgress. 

From the chapters on " Finish " let us clearly learn 
that vv'hat Ruskin calls by this name is life o less. 
His illustrations of Claude's and Constable's tree- 
drawing and of the real and vital growth of trees are 
to this point ; and nowhere is the extraordinary power 
of his own hand more manifest than in the plate 
" Strength of Old Pine." None but his word would 
describe his work. " The Use of Pictures " (a very knot 
of reasoning) and a brief history of the human spirit of 
the artist, antique and modern, bring us to the famous 



'MODERN painters' — THIRD VOLUME. 5^ 

"Pathetic Fallacy." This fallacy is a fiction (wanton, 
fanciful, imaginative, or more purely passionate) in our 
reading of natural things according to the feeling of our 
own hearts. Obviously it is chiefly poetry that is here 
in question ; and the reader should understand that 
Ruskin is not writing of poets who are no poets ; he 
admits two orders of poets, but no third, as doubtless a 
musician would admit two orders of musicians — two 
very arts of music, two muses — but no third ; and he 
places — agreeing therein with the greater number of 
critics — one order higher than the other, as a musician 
need not do in contemplating his own double-peaked 
hill. Ruskin makes an admirable opposition of the 
image without fallacy of Dante to the image with fallacy 
of Coleridge ; pausing for a moment (only a moment, 
for the chapter is intended to treat chiefly of noble and 
passionate fallacy) at the fallacy which is not poetic at 
all because it is assigned, as by Pope, to the wrong 
passion, and is cold. But I confess all this reasoning 
on poetry seems to fail — not impotently, but with vital 
efi"ort, and because of some prohibition from the begin- 
ning of the task — to fail to prove or even to demonstrate 
anything we do not know, or to disprove anything we 
feel. A whole chapter further on, for instance, shows 
Walter Scott to be better than a sentimentalist, better 
than a poet who works with difficulty, better than a poet 
who is self-conscious, better as a poet-seer than a mere 
poet-thinker, and moreover a thorough representative of 
his time by his love of nature, of the past, of colour, and 



56 JOHN RUSKIN. 

of the picturesque, by his sadness and lack of personal 
faith, and so forth. But at the end of the argument we 
shall not have been persuaded to take Scott to be a 
poet possessed of the spirit of poetry. The essay, how- 
ever, though a vain persuasion, is an excellent com- 
mentary ; take the sentence, for example, which explains 
how we have pleasure in Kingsley's fallacious "cruel 
foam," not because the words " fallaciously describe 
foam, but because they faithfully describe sorrow." 
The chapter has been popular, for it reaches none of 
the inner concentrations of thought that make Modern 
Painters arduous reading to a real reader. The chapter 
following, on "Classical Landscape," deals also with 
poetry. To the question whether the modern with his 
fancy does not see something in nature that Homer 
could not see, Ruskin replies that the Greek had his 
own feeling — that of faith and not of fallacy. "He 
never says the waves rage, or the waves are idle. But 
he says there is somewhat in, and greater than, the 
waves, which rages, and is idle, and that he calls a god." 
Nor will Ruskin consent to have Homer's Hera, cuffing 
the contentious Artemis about the ears, too much inter- 
preted. Let no one think to explain away "my real, 
running, beautiful, beaten Diana, into a moon behind 
clouds." Happy too, by its phrase, in the finely 
elaborate contrast of the antique and the modern spirit, 
is this passage on the Greek and the gods : — 

"To ask counsel of them, to obey them, to sacrifice 
to them, to thank them for all good, this was well ; but 



" 'MODERN painters' — THIRD VOLUME. 57 

to be utterly downcast before them, or not to tell 
them his mind in plain Greek if they seemed to him to 
he conducting themselves in an ungodly manner — this 
would not be well." 

And happy in thought is a passage on the modern who 
accepts sympathy from nature that he does not believe 
in, and gives her sympathy that he does not believe in 
(but should this part of the phrase be so positive as 
the other?), whereas the Greek had no sympathy at 
all with " actual wave and woody fibre." 

The exquisite chapter on " The Fields " traces the 
history of the landscape of vegetation, ancient and 
mediaeval, discovers the first sky in an illuminated 
manuscript and the first leaf in its borders — how it 
unfolded there ; and tracks the change in the human 
spirit in regard to the forest, wherein the man of the 
Middle Ages looked to meet with an enemy in ambush 
or a bear, whereas the ancient "expected to meet one 
or two gods, but no banditti " ; and " The Rocks " is 
a magnificent study of mountains as man beheld them 
in the ancient world and in the altered ages. Ruskin 
gives modern man, with his love of breeze, of shadows, 
of the ruling and dividing clouds, over to the gibe 
of Aristophanes ■ — • that he would " speak ingeniously 
concerning smoke," that he disbelieves in Jupiter, and 
crowns the whirlwind. Exquisite play is mingled with 
all the philosophy of these historic chapters. A 
summary but splendid history of colour in the arts 
— a spiritual history of the colours man has loved 



58 JOHN RUSKIN. 

— opens the question — treated at length by other pens 
long after Modern Painters was written — of the sense 
of colour in Antiquity ; and the study returns to 
Turner, the man who was first in the essentially 
modern painting of nature in place of the human 
form, as Bacon was first in the modern study of 
nature instead of the human mind. But in " The 
Moral of Landscape " Turner himself and all lovers 
of nature are arraigned with extreme austerity to 
justify, or rather to excuse, that passion for landscape 
wherewith some of the greatest of human intellects 
have not been charged ; and it is only after a medita- 
tion, full of misgiving, nay, of suffering, and courage, 
and after trying all things — all human wandering, from 
that of the truant schoolboy studying nature despite 
of duty and discipline, to that of the poet, astray on 
one of the infinite ways, in one of the infinite directions, 
of loss — it is only then that this teacher permits him- 
self to bless the human love of nature. With " trem- 
bling hope " and the profound decision that is to be won 
from the heart of hearts of a dreadful doubt, he calls 
finally upon the love and knowledge of landscape to 
mend specifically the foolish spirit of a century bent 
upon "annihilating time and space by steam" (as 
people said in 1850 — but the saying was confessedly 
mere rhetoric, and certainly a vulgar kind), whereas 
time is what wisdom would seek to gain, and space 
is full of beauty upon which wisdom would be glad 
to pause. 



'MODERN painters'— THIRD VOLUME. 59 

The volume closes with a little history of "The 
Teachers of Turner," which compares Scott, neglected 
as a boy, with Turner, educated a little in the formalism 
of a low degree of classical knowledge, which did, in 
fact, show the way to larger interests. Albeit Turner 
had to await his opportunity to steal from the Egerian 
wells to the Yorkshire streams, and " from Homeric 
rocks, with laurels at the top and caves at the bottom " 
to Alpine precipices carrying the pine, yet he gained 
something from the restraint, and was thereafter able 
to watch with pleasure " the staying of the silver foun- 
tain [the garden fountain] at its appointed height in 
the sky " as well as to pore with delight upon the 
unbound river. But, ordered, as a boy, to draw eleva- 
tions of Renaissance buildings, and commissioned as 
a youth to draw Palladian mansions for their owners, 
Turner never loved or understood architecture ; whereas 
Scott, if he learnt little of it, liked it heartily. " A 
forced admiration of Claude and a fond admiration 
of Titian," and of all the great Venetian landscape, are 
traced by Ruskin in Turner's early work ; with Cuyp 
Turner matched himself in emulation, and he suffered 
injury from the example of Vandevelde. Then follow 
some vigorous pages about Claude. "Tenderness of 
perception and sincerity of purpose" Ruskin attributes 
to him ; and confesses that he it was who first set the 
sun in heaven. But Claude's way of misunderstanding 
" the main point " is proved by Ruskin in the case 
of /Eneas drawing his bow, from the Lite?' Veritatis. 



6o JOHN RUSKIN, 

From the ending of this volume, which refers to 
the Crimean War, the reader should carry two phrases 
briefer and more concentrated than is usual with an 
author so bent on exposition. One is "the sunlight 
of deathbeds," and the other (on the sudden faults 
of nations) " For great, accumulated . . . cause, their 
foot slides in due time." And this is memorable as 
the note of a watcher of public things : — 

" I noticed that there never came news of the ex- 
plosion of a powder-barrel . . . but the Parliament lost 
confidence immediately in the justice of the war; re- 
opened the question whether we ever should have 
engaged in it, and remained in a doubtful and repentant 
state of mind until one of the enemy's powder-barrels 
blew up also." 

Defending himself against the not unrighteous charge 
that he not only neglected but scorned German phil- 
osophy, Ruskin avers, in his Appendix, that he is right 
to condemn " by specimen " : — 

" He who seizes all that he plainly discerns to be 
valuable, and never is U7ijust hut wheji he cannot honestly 
help it, will soon be enviable in his possessions, and 
venerable in his equity." 

The humorous phrase takes us on many years, to Fiction 
Fair and Foul, in the Niiieteenth Century, where Ruskin 
related his refusal to be troubled to read a certain 
novel he had heard praised; the "situation" of the 
story, they told him, was that of two people who had 
" compromised themselves in a boat " ; foul and foolish. 



'MODERN painters' — FOURTH VOLUME. 6l 

Not without pain or incredulity has the reader to learn 
that the passage so ridiculed is the flight and the return 
of Maggie Tulliver. Injustice may be as inevitable as 
"stumbling or being sick," but evitable was the pro- 
clamation of this stray, uninstructed, and unjustified 
judgment. The pardon of these implicit injustices 
surely depends upon their privacy, upon the silence 
that is not irrevocable, and on the secrecy wherewith a 
man keeps his own counsel as to his prejudice. 

The volumes are less difficult reading as the work 
goes forward, and the fourth has had ten readers for 
one reader of the earlier three. Partly for this cause the 
page on the Calais tower (placed in the late edition at 
the beginning of the volume) became famous : it evoked 
what its author calls the weak enthusiasms of those who 
missed the essential beauty because they thought them- 
selves elected to admire the "style." It is a passage 
of a chapter directed to correct and chastise that popular 
ideal of the " picturescjue " abroad and the "neat" at 
home wherewith many thousands go and come across 
the Channel. 

" The large neglect, the noble unsightliness of it ; the 
record of its years written so visibly, yet without sign of 
weakness or decay ; its stern wasteness and gloom, 
eaten away by the Cliannel winds, and overgrown by 
the bitter sea grasses ; its slates and tiles all shaken and 
rent, and yet not falling ; its desert of brickwork full of 
bolts, and holes, and ugly fissures, and yet strong, like a 
bare brown rock ; its carelessness of what any one thinks 
or feels about it, putting forth no claim, having no beauty 



62 JOHN RUSKIN. 

or desirableness, pride, nor grace ; yet neither asking for 
pity ; not, as ruins are, useless and piteous, feebly or 
fondly garrulous of better days; but useful still, going 
through its own daily work — as some old fisherman 
beaten grey by storm, yet drawing his daily nets ; so it 
stands, with no complaint about its past youth, in blanched 
and meagre massiveness and serviceableness, gathering 
human souls together underneath it ; the sound of its 
bells for prayer still rolling through its rents ; and the 
grey peak of it seen far across the sea, principal of the 
three that rise above the waste of surfy sand and hillocked 
shore — the lighthouse for life, and the belfry for labour, 
and this for patience and praise." 

Appropriate to the time, fifty years ago, is the rebuke 
that follows of the painter who went in search of " fallen 
cottage, deserted village, blasted heath, mouldering 
castle," — ^joyful sights to him alone of mankind, so that 
they did but " show jagged angles of stone and timber " : 
true, he mingled with his pleasures a slight tragical feel- 
ing, " a vague desire to live in cottages," a partly ro- 
mantic, partly humble, sympathy. Ruskin showed him 
his own triviality in contrast with the sympathy of genius 
which was Turner's. Tintoret had a like genius, but 
without humour. Veronese had such a sympathy, but 
without tragedy. Rubens wants grace and mystery. In 
Turner alone Ruskin finds the complete sympathy ; 
failing only as he was human. From the immeasurably 
various opened world before such a genius Turner chose 
great things, not contenting himself with the personal 
impression that might make odds and ends dear to him, 
as Ruskin's young pre-Raphaelites were doing, leaving the 



'MODERN painters' — FOURTH VOLUME. 6^ 

noble things to be made into "vignettes for annuals," or 
to be painted vilely. Surely the surviving slander that 
Ruskin would have his disciples to "select nothing and 
to neglect nothing " might have been silenced once for 
all by the note to this same page, which proves him to 
have directed none but the preparatory studies of young 
learners by that celebrated phrase. Nor is any contro- 
versy possible in face of another page of this volume : — 

" If a painter has inventive power he is to treat his 
subject [by] . . . giving not the actual facts of it, but 
the impression it made on his mind." 

Ruskin supplied his future opponents with this word and 
with this thought which they brandished and vaunted 
on their side of some supposed controversy. In truth, 
he allows a "great inventive landscape painter" to do 
what he likes, to give not the image but the spirit of a 
place, to go down into a jumbled and formless lower 
valley of the Alps with his mind full of the terrors of a 
pass above ; and in that power of impression to transform 
the rocks. But let the uninventive beware of the paltry 
work of composing ; let Aim learn to make portraits of 
places, and record for us the battlefield for the sake of 
strategy, the castle before it moulders away, the abbey 
before it is pulled to the ground, the beast before it is 
extinct, the topography of Venice before the city is 
destroyed ; that is art enough for him. But, unfortun- 
ately, he is not to be trusted for facts ; and Ruskin 
finds that the dull Canaletto, far from making a pic- 
ture, cannot so much as record exactly where a house 



64 JOHN RUSKIN. 

stood. If any one shall say, moreover, that by this or 
that invention Turner did wrong inventively, Ruskin 
replies, "The dream said not so to Turner." 

The succeeding chapters are a long lesson on the 
initial and unending difficulties of illumination, and of 
the degrees of pictorial vision, from which I must quote 
no more than this on relations or " values " : — 

" Despise the earth ; fix your eyes on its gloom, and 
forget its loveliness ; and we do not thank you for your 
languid or despairing perception of brightness in heaven. 
But rise up actively from the earth, — learn what there is 
in it, know its colour and form . . . and if after that you 
can say 'heaven is bright,' it will be a precious truth." 

And this from the study of colour as more than all else 
a painter's business : — 

" The student may be led into folly by philosophers, 
and into falsehood by purists ; but he is always safe if 
he holds the hand of a colourist." 

And this, on Mystery : — 

" All distinct drawing must be bad drawing, and . , . 
nothing can be right till it is unintelligible. . . . Excel- 
lence of the highest kind, without obscurity, cannot 
exist." 

Assuredly, without difficulty from the objections of 
modern readers, who are convinced already, Ruskin 
controls by means of these truths his own doctrine of 
detail. It is the perception of mystery that the greatest 
of all masters have added to the perception of truth 
— Turner, Tintoret, and Paul Veronese, mysterious 



'MODERN PAINTERS' — FOURTH VOLUME. 65 

painters, whose perception, " first as to what is to be 
done, and then of the means of doing it, is so colossal 
that I always feel in the presence of their pictures just 
as other people would in that of a supernatural being." 
The student should weigh well the words "perception 
of mystery" and all that they imply, as distinct from 
"power of dispelling mystery" or any such phrase. All 
invention, moreover, all mystery, and all intricacy must 
close in a simple and natural pictorial vision, which 
would be like a child's if it were not more compre- 
hensive. Finally, "The right of being obscure is not 
one to be lightly claimed." From this point the fourth 
volume of Modern Painters becomes chiefly a direct 
study of nature, a study indescribably rich but not to 
be followed by notes and summaries. An exception 
there is in the digression on the character and condi- 
tions of the Valais peasantry, in " Mountain Gloom," a 
chapter full of poignant thoughts. Some fault of 
reasoning may be detected in the attribution to their 
religion of a peculiar melancholy in these people, 
whereas to the same cause a different effect must be 
referred amongst the equally unworldly countrymen of 
Lombardy, and whereas Ruskin himself, after writing 
with bitterness of this religious source of sorrow, goes 
on to show that he and they and all of us have cause 
enough of grief without it. Exquisite is the sad record 
of the work of the husbandman — without books, or 
thoughts, or attainments, or rest — at his small crops on 
the ledges of these divine mountain-sides, where " the 

E 



66 JOHN RUSKIN. 

meadows run in and out like inlets of lake among the 
harvested rocks, sweet with perpetual streamlets." The 
historical digression, in " Mountain Glory," studies the 
mountains in their relation to the history of the mind 
of man, as the answering aspect of man towards the 
mountains was studied in an earlier page ; and here 
again I lose the proof of the argument. Ruskin 
seems to compel the presence of the mountains to 
account for contrary things, rises and falls, in the 
history of Italian painting. And the accompanying 
inquiry as to the mountain influence upon literary 
power seems to be one of the few enterprises of 
this courageous mind that do not altogether justify 
themselves ; but even here how much splendour of 
thought ! 



6/ 



CHAPTER V. 

'MODERN PAINTERS.' 

THE FIFTH VOLUME (1860). 

The last volume of this enormous work of thought, 
imagination, sincerity, and devotion is chiefly a con- 
tinuation of the study of natural landscape, of form 
in the leaf, anatomy in the branch ; of the play of 
these creatures of earth with the light from the skies, 
and the unimaginable shadows that " stumble over 
everything they come across " — a world of its own 
that of the experimental shadow ! This volume 
is a study of the whole garden : " How have we 
ravaged instead of kept it ! " and of the unalterable 
skies. The more intent the study is, the more im- 
passioned — a look of adoration at arm's length, a 
kiss at close quarters. The large sense of vegetation, 
that unsuffering creature, with its youth, age, death 
perpetually rehearsed, grows yet more poetic when it 
is the little will of the bud to grow to a pinnacle that 
Ruskin looks into, with his incomparably lovely botany. 



68 JOHN RUSKIN. 

He tells us of the trees that are builders with the shield, 
and of those that are builders with the sword, accord- 
ing to the manner in which they defend their buds ; he 
tells us what, measured month by month, is the year's 
work, and, by the pei-iodicity of the life of vegeta- 
tion itself, what is the age's ; how the young leaves, 
"like the young bees," keep out of each other's way. 
The exquisite science of the book is for the service of 
art, for the aspect of the leaf in nature, and for the 
praise of the leaf-drawing of Titian and Holbein, and 
for the refutation of the leaf-drawing of Ruysdael and 
Hobbema. Ruskin shows us, in boughs, the will, fire, 
and fantasy of growth measured by the strong law of 
nervous life and strong law of material attraction, the 
height of a tree controlled by the gravitation that 'sinks 
the fall of lead. He shows us the whole mathematical 
truths of actual and of pictorial balance in wild asym- 
metric nature and in Turner ; and the incoherence, the 
lack of equilibrium, in the dull-leaved branch of Salvator 
Rosa ; and how the false work lacks wit as well as 
poise. He proves to us the conditions of the leaf- 
bearing bough — harmony, obedience, distress (or diffi- 
culty), and happy inequality. Ruskin has said that he 
was content with himself for one thing — he had done 
justice to the pine. But he has done justice also to the 
oak, and to the poplar. Something that belongs to the 
special leaf, to the division of the twigs, to the definite 
design that by their tips all the twigs and branches 
together draw as the figure of the tree, something that 



'MODERN painters' — FIFTH VOLUME. 6g 

is peculiar to the complexion of the leaf and to its 
green, and is the spirit of the woods, abides about the 
names of all trees in these pages. 

" Between the earth and man arose the leaf. Be- 
tween the heaven and man arose the cloud. His life 
being partly as the falling leaf, and partly as the flying 
vapour." 

But the chapters on clouds here following — " Cloud 
Balancings," "Cloud Flocks," "Cloud Chariots," "The 
Angel of the Sea" — are not only scientific studies of 
clouds carried further than those in the first volume, 
and observations multiplied, but are probably intended 
to mend the former work as literature. The page of 
sixteen years before had been rather abruptly patched 
with decorated and splendid passages ; the page of the 
last volume is more glorious, the words are more abun- 
dant. Ruskin himself has half disowned the eloquence 
in the writing of the earlier volumes, but in truth this 
fifth volume outdoes all that had gone before. The 
purpose, nevertheless, is as severe as ever ; here, as 
throughout this long task — " the investigation of the 
beauty of the visible world " — it was always, as Ruskin 
says in regard to the reader, " accuracy I asked of 
him, not sympathy ; patience, not zeal ; apprehension, 
not sensation." 

The following part of this volume deals with certain 
laws of art, such as that of composition, not fully 
treated elsewhere. And here again we seem to be 
cast back upon the single law of Genius. As Ruskin 



70 JOHN RUSKIN. 

banned "every kind of falsity," yet allowed Rubens 
to make an horizon aslant with the drift of a stormy 
picture, and praised Vandyck for his grey roses ; so, 
as to composition, he tells us that no expression, truth 
to nature, nor sentiment can win him to look at a 
picture twice if it is ill composed, yet the composition 
cannot be prescribed by law ; it is to be as a great 
painter makes it. The reader will, of course, under- 
stand that " composition " in this chapter and " com- 
position" in the great chapters on the "Faculties of 
the Imagination " must be taken with separate meanings ; 
in the latter case a false composition is implied. Ruskin 
has, needless to say, studied the true composition of 
his great painters as deeply as their other qualities, 
and he gives a technical lesson thereon in "The Law 
of Help," starting from the contrast of the decom- 
position which is death and the composition which is 
natural life, and showing true pictorial composition to 
be coherence, imity, and vitality itself. 

"In true composition, everything not only lielps 
everything else a little, but helps with its utmost power. 
. . . Not a line, not a spark of colour, but is doing its 
very best." 

And this should correct the doubts of those who have 
repeated that Ruskin teaches finish to be " an added 
truth." He never meant thereby a piecemeal truth ; for 
what is added in a fine picture is added, he tells us in 
this chapter, inevitably and in unity ; and even when 
he represents a true artist asking himself where, in his 



'MODERN painters' — FIFTH VOLUME. 7 1 

picture, he- can " crowd in " another detail, another 
thought, to think this to be an afterthought or a later 
detail would be to misinterpret Ruskin's whole body of 
teaching. Inferior artists, he says, are afraid of finish 
not because they have unity, but because they have it 
not. Nor have they the deed^ which is the act of pur- 
pose. The greatest deed is creation, and the creation 
of life. In " The Law of Perfectness " we have the fruit 
of an additional study of Titian — " the winter was spent 
mainly in trying to get at the mind of Titian " — 
especially in his execution of colour ; that is, the 
ground, the working in, the striking over of colours. 
" The Dark Mirror " sums up the four landscape orders 
of Europe: Heroic (Titian); Classical (Nicolo Poussin); 
Pastoral (Cuyp) ; Contemplative (Turner) ; and two 
spurious forms : Picturesque and Hybrid. The reader 
has to resign himself to the banishment from Ruskin's 
thought of all the great French landscape. Once or 
twice he names French modern work with horror as 
something deathly ; but what he knows, if anything, 
of the young Corot, for example, or of Millet, one 
cannot so much as conjecture. For Venetian art he 
claims a share of the Greek spirit which is able to 
look without shrinking into the darkness, unentangled 
in the melancholy war of the northern souls of Holbein 
and Diirer, unconquered by the evil that not only en- 
tangled but possessed Salvator. Therefore one chapter 
is called "The Lance of Pallas "and the other "The 
Wings of the Lion," and both deal with the race and 



72 JOHN RUSKIN. 

character of Titian. A courageous " but not very 
hopeful or cheerful faith " (and this, in spite of the 
gaiety of interest which is Mr Meredith's, might be 
a phrase of this last-named master's teaching) is that 
which is " rewarded by clear practical success and 
splendid intellectual power." And this was in the 
highest degree Shakespeare's ; for although " at the 
close of Shakespeare's tragedy nothing remains but 
dead march and clothes of burial," yet he was able to 
endure that close. It was also that of the Greek 
tragedy, with this difference in the sorrow — that it is 
connected with sin by the Greek and not by Shake- 
speare ; and this difference in the close — that with the 
Greek there is a promise of divine triumph and rising 
again. Serene is Homer's spirit, with an added cheer- 
fulness of his own, and practical hope in fjresent 
things. 

" The gods have given us at least this glorious body 
and this righteous conscience." 

Therefrom came conquest ; and the destroying, op- 
pressing, slaying, and betraying gods turned kind ; 
Artemis guarded their flocks, and Phcebus, " lord of 
the three great spirits of life — Care, Memory, and 
Melody — " turned healer. Ruskin shows us the 
Venetians also courageous, but a little sadder on the 
surface, a little less serious beneath, having arisen from, 
and partly rejected, asceticism. Seizing truth of colour 
as only he can, he makes us understand much by 



'MODERN painters' — FIFTH V(^LUME. 73 

telling us that they sunburn all their hermits to a 
splendid brown. And he tells us of the dealings of 
the sea with this people that despised agriculture and 
had no gardens, but a "perpetual May" of the waters. 
Nay, not a perpetual May ; we may join issue with 
Ruskin as to the seasons of the sea. Did even he, 
who knew better than to follow the fashion, and who 
went to the Alps when the gentians were blue — did 
even he not know the May that kindles the Adriatic 
and is not perpetual, or it would not be May? But 
how exquisitely is this written of the Venetian citizen, 
with its allusions to certain Greeks — to Anacreon, to 
Aristophanes, and to Hippias Major : 

" No swallow chattered at his window, nor, nestled 
under his golden roofs, claimed the sacredness of his 
mercy ; no Pythagorean fowl taught him the blessings 
of the poor, nor did the grave spirit of poverty rist? at 
his side to set forth the delicate grace and honour of 
lowly life. No humble thoughts of grasshopper sire 
had he, like the Athenian ; no gratitude for gifts of 
olive ; no childish care for figs, any more than thistles.'^ 

As usual Ruskin betakes himself to the religion of 
the Venetians ; the most he knows of it was told him 
in the nursery at Heme Hill ; submitting to this, and 
to the cruel passing-over, as something non-existent, 
of the enormous work of one faculty of religion — Com- 
passion — that changed the face of nations, we shall 
hear in this chapter great things, nobly said, about the 
Venetian soul of man. It is a pity that half a page 
of refutation should be wasted in condescension to so 



74 JOHN RUSKIN. 

vulgar an English modern opinion as that the Venetian 
lord painted on his knees was a hypocrite. But the 
worldly end of this religious art and majestic intellect 
(Titian was not less religious than Tintoret, but " the 
religion of Titian is like that of Shakespeare — occult 
behind his magnificent equity " ) came to pass and is 
accounted for by Ruskin after his own subtle way : 

" In its roots of power and modes of work ; in its 
belief, its breadth, and its judgment, I find the Venetian 
mind perfect ; . . . wholly noble in its sources, it was 
wholly unworthy in its purposes." 

The Venetian believed in the religion, but " he de- 
sired the delight." It is difficult to the reader thus 
to divide source from purpose. When Ruskin says 
that Titian painted the Assumption " because " he 
"enjoyed rich masses of red and blue, and faces 
flushed with sunlight," I confess I need to be told 
that this "because" refers to purpose and not to 
source. Is there not, finally, something omitted in 
this history of Venetian art as also in the histories 
of Florentine, and of Greek, and of Northern, and 
of French, and of Lombard, and of all arts whereof 
Ruskin has written the vicissitudes - — and is not this 
the law of movement and of alteration ? He goes far, 
goes deep, goes close, to explain the inevitable change 
which comes about perhaps through no action that 
man can know by searching or can arrest for an hour. 
The following chapter, " Diirer and Salvator," is 
upon art reconciled to sorrow, and upon the " Resur- 



'MODERN painters' — FIFTH VOLUME. 75 

rection of Death " of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries. First of Salvator Rosa, " the condemned 
Salvator," the bearer of the last signs of the spiritual 
life in the art of Europe, who named himself " Despiser 
of wealth and of death." " Two grand scorns," says 
Ruskin, but " the question is not for man what he 
can scorn but what he can love." Diirer, on the 
other hand, was quiet, riding in fortitude with Death, 
like his own Knight. Claude and Caspar Poussin, 
"classical," but incapable of the Greek or the Roman 
spirit, renounced the labour and sorrow whereto man 
is born and so became ornamental, renounced the 
pursuit of wealth and so became pastoral and pretended 
to study nature ; they made selections from amongst 
the gods. In their works " Minerva rarely presents 
herself, except to be insulted by the judgment of Paris." 
And in this chapter occurs the last elaborate passage 
on Claude, the man of " fine feeling for beauty of form 
and considerable tenderness of perception," whose 
" aerial effects are unrivalled," and whose seas are " the 
most beautiful in old art " ; but who was an artist with- 
out passion. For its humour I must quote the de- 
scription of Claude's " St George and the Dragon " : 

" A beautiful opening in woods by a river side ; a 
pleasant fountain . . . and rich vegetation. . . . The 
dragon is about the size of ten bramble leaves, and is 
being killed by the remains of a lance ... in his 
throat, curling his tail in a highly offensive and threaten- 
ing manner. St George, notwithstanding, on a prancing 
horse, brandishes his sword, at about thirty yards' dis- 



"]& JOHN RUSKIN. 

tance from the offensive animal. A semicircular shelf 
of rocks encircles the foreground, by which the theatre 
of action is divided into pit and boxes. Some women 
and children having descended unadvisedly into the pit 
are helping each other out of it again. ... A prudent 
person of rank has taken a front seat in the boxes, 
crosses his legs, leans his head on his hand ; . . . two 
attendants stand in graceful attitudes behind him, and 
two more walk away under the trees, conversing on 
general subjects." 

As to Claude's "Worship of the Golden Calf," "in 
order better to express the desert of Sinai, the river 
is much larger, and the vegetation softer. Two people, 
uninterested in idolatrous ceremonies, are rowing in 
a pleasure-boat on the river." Poussin's " strong but 
degraded mind " is the subject of graver phrases ; all 
he does well has been better done by Titian ; he 
also in his manner is condemned for lack of passion. 
The pastoral landscape, more properly so called — Cuyp 
and Teniers the type of its painters — was lower yet, 
destitute not of spiritual character only, but of spiritual 
thought. Cuyp can paint sunlight, but paints un- 
thoughtfuUy. " Nothing happens in his pictures, ex- 
cept some indifferent person's asking the way of 
somebody else, who, by his cast of countenance, 
seems not likely to know it." Paul Potter " does not 
care even for sheep, but only for wool." 

"Titian could have put issues of life and death into 
the face of a man asking his way ; nay, into the back of 
him. . . . He has put a whole scheme of dogmatic 



'MODERN painters' — FIFTH VOLUME. J^ 

theology into a row of bishops' backs at the Louvre. 
And for dogs, Velasquez has made some of them nearly 
as grand as his surly Kings." 

It is in the same chapter that Raskin speaks of the 
trivial sentiment and caricature of Landseer, who " gave 
up the true nature of the animal " for the sake of 
a jest. And by this mature judgment the reader should 
correct a passage of praise in an earlier volume. 

In the chapter that contrasts Wouvermans and 
Angelico, 'Ruskin tells us how he finds it impossible 
to "lay hold of the temper " of some of the Dutch 
painters, workmanlike though they are. Wouvermans 
and Berghem are amongst the masters of the " hybrid 
landscape," intended to combine the attractions of the 
other schools, but they have a " clay-cold, ice-cold in- 
capacity of understanding what pleasure meant." Music, 
dancing, hunting, boating, fishing, bathing, and child- 
play are sprinkled in a picture of Wouvermans, but 
the fishing and bathing go on close together ; no one 
turns to look at the hunting ; hart and hind gallop 
across the middle of the river touching bottom, but 
a man dives at the edge where it is deep ; the dancing 
has no spring ; the buildings are part ruin, part villa. 
Ruskin holds this paralysis of dramatic invention to 
be the consequence of the desire to please sentsual 
patrons by offering them " inventoried articles of 
pleasure." " Unredeemed carnal appetite " seems to 
the reader a somewhat violent sentence for this cold 
incontinence of incident, this trifling of convention. 



yS JOHN RUSKIN. 

but Ruskin has never allowed trifling to be a trifle, 
whether in art or in life. The study of Angelico, 
master of the Purist school ("I have guarded my 
readers from over - estimating that school "), opposes 
spirituality to this luxury about which the reader has 
perhaps his doubts. As for Angelico, a dramatic or 
imaginative movement of some embracing angel amongst 
his groups seems to me to save him, barely, from 
weakness ; and it is doubtful whether we may name 
any weak thing as typically spiritual. 

Ruskin goes back to Turner in the chapter called 
"The Two Boyhoods," which paints the Venice of 
the young Giorgione, and the Maiden Lane, the 
Chelsea, the Covent Garden, and Thames side of the 
London child. The description of Venice is some- 
what too gorgeous. It is hardly possible for any one 
who knows Italy to imagine her at any time all 
alabaster, bronze, and marble, splendidly draped. But 
like this untempered Venice of fancy is Ruskin's page. 
It is one of the beautiful passages that I do not ex- 
tract, marking only with pleasure the quiet phrase that 
explains how no weak walls, low-roofed cottage, or 
straw-built shed could be built over those " tremulous 
streets." Turner's only drawing of an English clergy- 
man is excellently described, and Turner in the fogs. 
Turner among the ships, Turner in the outer ways 
of the trampled market. Ever after, his foregrounds 
had " a succulent cluster or two of green-grocery at 
the corners." But the England of his day did graver 



'MODERN painters' — FIFTH VOLUME. 79 

things to him even than the nurturing of this great 
childhood in squalor. Ruskin gives us the exposition 
of the first picture painted by Turner with his whole 
strength — the Garden of the Hesperides of 1806 — as a 
great religious picture of that opening century, and its re- 
ligion the triumph of the dragon of Mammon or Covetous- 
ness, sleepless, human-voiced, // gran nemico of Dante, 
set by Turner in a paradise of smoke, conceived by 
the painter's imaginative intellect as iron-hearted, with 
a true bony contour, organic, but like a glacier. And 
as an earlier chapter had ended : " This " (the labour, 
that is, of Albert Diirer) " is indeed the labour which 
is crowned with laurel and has the wings of the eagle. 
It was reserved for another country to prove . . . the 
labour which is crowned with fire and has the wings 
of the bat " \ so this sad chapter on the " Nereid's 
Guard " closes with the fulfilment of the menace ; the 
" other country " and the other age were Turner's. 
Ruskin's beloved painter was also, like Salvator himself, 
in part overcome of evil. And when he fought his 
way to nature and the skies, painting iinn-colour as 
Claude and Cuyp had painted but ^wnshine^ the world 
not only rejected but reviled him. " One fair dawn 
or sunset obediently beheld " would have set it right, 
and justified his painting of the coloured Apollo. 
His critics shouted, "Perish Apollo. Bring us back 
Python." " And Python came," adds Ruskin, " came 
literally as well as spiritually ; all the perfect beauty 
and conquest which Turner wrought is already withered." 



8o JOHN RUSKIN. 

This refers to the destruction that has come so soon 
upon the very material of Turner's work — wrecked, 
faded, and defiled, yet even so better than any other 
landscape painting unmarred. 

No man, before Turner, had painted clouds scarlet. 
" Hesperid ^gle and Erytheia [the blushing one] fade 
into the twilights of four thousand years unconfessed." 
And in this new page on the great subject of colour 
Ruskin teaches us that albeit form is of incalculably 
greater importance, an error in colour is graver than an 
error in form, because of relation ; the form belongs to 
the thing it defines, the colour to the thing and to all 
about it; to deal falsely with the colour "breaks the 
harmony of the day." I do not know a more luminous 
thought on colour than this, even in these shining 
pages. Few have been the supreme colourists : Titian, 
Giorgione, Veronese, Tintoret, Correggio, Reynolds, and 
Turner, as Ruskin counts them — seven ; whereas of the 
other qualities or powers of art the great masters have 
been many. 

Under the title of " Peace " the last great chapter of 
this great work closes, not peacefully, but with passionate 
grief. Turner had been dead nearly twenty years, but 
the cruelty of the " criticism " that had made his life 
lonely and painful had never ceased to wound his 
friend. 

" There never was yet . . . isolation of a great spirit 
so utterly desolate. . . . My own admiration was wild 
in enthusiasm but it gave him no ray of pleasure ; he 



'MODERN PAINTERS' — FIFTH VOLUME. 8 1 

could not make me at that time understand his main 
meanings ; he loved me, but cared nothing for what I 
said, and was always trying to hinder me from writing, 
because it gave pain to his fellow-artists. ... To cen- 
sure Turner was acutely sensitive. . . . He knew that 
however little hi* higher power could be seen, he had 
at least done as much as ought to have saved him from 
wanton insult, and the attacks upon him in his later 
years were to him not merely contemptible in their 
ignorance, but amazing in their ingratitude." 

Let the reader bear in mind that it was precisely in the 
first year that showed a Royal Academy tvithout any 
pictures of Turner's that the ' Times ' had learnt to call 
them " works of inspiration." It is characteristic of 
Ruskin that he cannot take the customary comfort and 
say that Turner learnt in the sorrow he underwent what 
he had not learnt in the joy he missed ; the last pages 
of Modern Painters protest against this form of com- 
monplace. They utter, finally, one of many menaces 
against a world intent upon gain, and negligent of art 
and nature. Men in England had learnt, say these 
mournful closing sentences, not to say in their hearts 
"There is no God," but to say aloud, "There is a 
foolish God"; "His orders will not work"; "Faith, 
generosity, honesty, zeal, and self-sacrifice are poetical 
phrases " ; and " The power of man is only power of 
prey : otherwise than the spider, he cannot design ; 
otherwise than the tiger, he cannot feed." 



82 



CHAPTER VI. 

'THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE' (1S49). 

This was the first illustrated book published by Ruskin. 
The illustrated volumes of Modcrti Painters followed 
it closely with their splendid cloud and tree drawing. 
In the Sevefi Lainps the etchings are of course archi- 
tectural, but they are etchings of a living stone. A 
vitality of construction, of time, of shadow and light, and 
of the power and weight of stone are in these plates, 
overbitten and not altogether technically successful as 
they are : I speak of those of the first edition, afterwards 
withdrawn. Ruskin made his drawings from windows, 
lofts, and ladders, holding on as he might, and bit the 
plates hurriedly on his journey home. 

The book was an incident of the third volume of 
Modern Painters — a pause upon the topic of archi- 
tecture, but a pause as it were in haste and full of some 
of the most intent and urgent labour of John Ruskin's 
life. There was no need for despatch when primroses 
were to be outlined, or when a lax, random weaving 
of grasses grown to the flower in June was to be woven 



'THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCIIITECTURi;.' 83 

again with a delicate pencil : for another year would • 
make amends for any possible lapse of purpose or 
interruption of work, yielding new flowers to take the 
place of the old. A student of vegetation may " wake, 
and learn the world, and sleep again," not lying in 
wait for changes, but confident of that repetition which 
makes nature old and mystical to memory, and of that 
renewal which makes her young and simple to hope 
— a mother to the spirit and a child to the eye. The 
painter of mountains will not be defrauded by years 
of the ancient line upon the sky. The linked memories 
of all generations are not long enough, in all, to out- 
watch and to record a change in a little hill. He may 
be blind, or mad, or absent, but the shape of a bay 
will await his light, his reason, or his return. Not so 
with the student of ancient buildings, who would arrest 
the action of time, and who therefore must make his 
own hour of labour elastic with application and with 
vigilance ; albeit mere time, Ruskin tells us, unbuilds 
so slowly that if men took pains, they might repair his 
action — not by the futile effort of " restoration " but 
by honest proppings and shorings that should confess 
their own date and purpose and make no confusions 
in the history of construction. It is not the unbuilding 
of time, therefore, that presses the student, but the 
destruction wrought with violence by man, contempt- 
uous and impatient of the work of the past, or con- 
fident that he can do something better with the stones 
unset and set up in another fashion. Ruskin was 



84 JOHN RUSKIN. 

obliged to delay the third volume of Modern Painters 
while he made his drawings of that which no eye should 
see and no hand should copy again. A note to the 
preface of The Seven Lamps tells us that the writer's 
"whole time has been lately occupied in taking drawings 
from one side of buildings, of which the masons were 
knocking down the other." 

The book, taking its place as an interlude in what 
was the continuous work of the young "Graduate of 
Oxford," takes its place also ^s a book definite in 
motive, justified by the unity of the matter, the re- 
sponsibility of the purpose, and the fulness of prepara- 
tion — the conscience and conviction need hardly be 
named ; but The Seveti Lamps of Architecture i^, more 
than some of its followers, one book from beginning to 
end. It has the unity of abundant matter, — the unity, 
that is, which need not break boundaries although it 
stretches and enlarges them with fulness, but holds 
together, amply, easily, containing with patience the 
urgence of a throng of thoughts. And the subject has 
its own unity of time, in as much as the dominating 
centre of the book is the work of a certain half- 
century. 

We shall find nothing more characteristic of Ruskin 
than this incident of the fifty years in question. Let 
me describe them, though roughly enough, to the 
reader, by means of Ruskin's own discovery that they 
were the years in which the stonemason, setting his 
work of Gothic tracery between man and the heavens, 



'THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE.' 85 

thought equally of the form of the light he revealed by 
his window and of the form of the stone whereby he 
revealed it. The eyes of that stonemason's father 
had been chiefly intent upon the opening, the star ; 
the form of it had been in his fancy ; and in the mental 
councils of invention the shape of this exterior light, 
as his work was about to define it, had been the presi- 
dent image. The son of that stonemason, on the other 
hand — the half-century being past — thought in the fore- 
most place of the shape of his beautiful stone ; beautiful 
it was, but not more beautiful than his whose fortune 
it was to live in the great half-century, and whose act 
it was to do the work that made the half-century great. 
This latter — the stone-sculptor of the fifty years here 
set in the midst — designing a star of sky and designing 
the starred stone with the dignity of equal invention, 
made the window that is manifestly the noblest. 
Ruskin, with singular sight and singular insight, per- 
ceives the manner, the cause, the past, the future, and 
the value of that window, and gives it an historical 
place and sanction. There is no child that does not 
lie staring at the wall and fancying that a wall-paper 
design seems now to take the shape enclosed by lines 
and anon the shape of the intervals instead ; and 
Ruskin's eye saw the tracery simply, impartially, and 
without preoccupation, like a child's, and saw it with 
the mason's eye moreover, and with the discerning 
spirit of a master of theory. The reader might be 
tempted to urge this incident beyond its proper sig- 



86 JOHN RUSKIN. 

nificance as an architectural or historical discovery, 
but he can hardly be wrong in appreciating the passage 
for its authorship — authorship, that is, and all that 
it implies of character, nature, and special and manifold 
fitness for the work of the book. 

To proceed to the expository task. 

The Seven Lamps of Architecture are : The Lamp of 
Sacrifice ; The Lamp of Truth ; The Lamp of Power ; 
The Lamp of Beauty ; The Lamp of Life ; The Lamp 
of Memory ; The Lamp of Obedience. On the cloth- 
cover of the original edition, designed by Ruskin after 
the arabesques of the pavement of San Miniato, above 
Florence — foliage, birds, and beasts arranged by 
counter-change — are embossed seven other words of 
kindred meaning : Religio ; Observantia ; Auctoritas ; 
Fides ; Obedientia ; Memoria ; Spiritus. The volume 
is divided into unequal chapters, headed with the 
English titles already stated. The first has in greatest 
measure the signs of the author's yet unmitigated youth. 
It is not so much the work of an untamed spirit as that 
of a spirit wearing certain bonds with all its will, a 
thousand times convinced, and that from the first 
infancy. There is the tone of a man troubled to 
convey his indignation by terms adequate, in the 
passage wherein he threatens the English nation with 
sensible visitation of divine wrath upon her honour, her 
commerce, and her arts as a retribution for the measure 
whereby a place in her legislature had been "impiously 
conceded to the Romanist." All this was not only 



*THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE.' 8/ 

disclaimed but unsaid in succeeding editions. Child- 
hood with its passions — the polemic passion of a 
spiritual and intellectual home-boy is one of the most 
tumultuous of fresh passions — was still in a sense in 
Ruskin's heart during the writing of The Seven Lamps. 
In some things he made, as we shall hear him tell later 
in Fors Clavtgera, a definite change ; he, for one, could 
not live under the stress of doctrines that obliged and 
admitted of no transaction, and yet actually suffered 
daily transaction at the hands of their professors. He 
had thought every moment committed to crime that 
was not spent in rescuing men from eternal reprobation; 
the choice was now thrust upon him : should he devote 
his years and moments directly, theologically, and 
immediately, or should he mitigate his conviction of 
the instant stress of obligation ? How he answered the 
question may be judged from the fact that he addressed 
himself to the mediate work of art. 

" The Lamp of Sacrifice " needs not from a commen- 
tator to-day the definition that was due when The Seven 
Lamps was written. Manifestly, this author's works 
have both enriched the minds of Englishmen with 
ideas and have accustomed them to the apprehension 
of ideas. What he ha.s thought and pronounced abides 
with us, as it were, both in mechanical suspension and 
in chemical solution. He has charged us with his 
teachings, and has modified our intelligence. Thus, 
many of his pages seem now to be over-anxiously 
expository that were not so when he composed them. 



88 JOHN RUSKIN. 

In this matter he stands between the old age and the 
new. Briefly, he suggests in this chapter a delicate 
distinction between sacrifice and waste ; between that 
work upon partially concealed ornament, which is the 
continuation of visible ornament, and thus justifies the 
surmise of the eye and keeps a promise, and work 
bestowed carelessly or with ignorance as to how to 
" make it tell," or with heartless contempt of the value 
of human effort. This last is the subject of a " nice 
balance." From art that is purely wasted on the one 
hand, and from art (or art so-called) that is purely 
exhibitory, on the other, the right spirit of sacrifice is 
absent. Hard work is approved — " all old work nearly 
has been hard work." 

As usual, the examples are exceedingly interesting. 
We are taught to respect the economy of the bas-reliefs 
of San Zeno at Verona, with their rich work well in 
sight, and the simplicity of the still lovely work of the 
arcade above, the various distances being treated not 
by a difference in degree of beauty in decoration, but 
by a difference in the quality of design. And so forth 
with a series of instances that yield all their significance 
to the sight and insight of Ruskin's intellectual eyes. 
It follows from this doctrine of sacrifice that rich orna- 
ment (the natural flower of Gothic) is praised with an 
ardour by which a reader to-day may be slow to be 
enkindled : he has, without intending it, perhaps 
gradually grown to love simplicity, albeit conscious 
that it is vulgar ornament and not fine that has made 



•THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE.' 89 

plain masonry to seem so attractive. But under 
Ruskin's teaching this tendency must be corrected, 
and in fact sacrificed. Many a modern man finds a 
charm in a blank strong wall that he knows is more 
than any negative merit ought to have for him. Such 
simplicities, he has to learn, 

"are but the rests and monotones of the art; it is 
to its far happier, far higher, exultation that we owe 
those fair fronts of variegated mosaic, charged with wild 
fancies and dark hosts of imagery, thicker and quainter 
than ever filled the depth of midsummer dream ; those 
vaulted gates, trellised with close leaves ; these window- 
labyrinths of twisted tracery and starry light ; those 
misty masses of multitudinous pinnacle and diademed 
tower ; the only witnesses, perhaps, that remain to us of 
the faith and fear of nations. All else for which the 
builders sacrificed has passed away — all their living 
interests, and aims, and achievements. We know not 
for what they laboured, and we see no evidence of their 
reward. Victory, wealth, authority, happiness — all have 
departed, though bought by many a bitter sacrifice. 
But of them, and their life and their toil upon the 
earth, one reward, one evidence, is left to us in those 
grey heaps of deep-wrought stone. They have taken 
with them to the grave their powers, their honours, and 
their errors ; but they have left us their adoration." 

This splendid passage is itself a Gothic architecture 
of style. It closes the section of "The Lamp of 
Sacrifice." The second chapter opens with a page 
of even higher beauty, in honour of the authority of 
Truth, the terrible virtue that has no borderland (so 
Ruskin was doubtless taught in his childhood ; and 



90 JOHN RUSKIN. 

so he teaches with his manly voice, thunderous). But 
who that has dealt, unprejudiced, with the common 
matters of the conscience will be able to cry assent 
to such a doctrine? Can the angler who deceives a 
fish, or the physician who deceives a lunatic, dare to 
aver with Ruskin that "Truth regards with the same 
severity the lightest and the boldest violations of its 
law " ; that it is the one quality " of which there are 
no degrees " ; that whereas " there are some faults 
slight in the sight of love, some errors slight in the 
estimate of wisdom, truth forgives no insult, and endures 
no stain " ? Assuredly by no such rhetoric is this one 
virtue to be separated from the rest — her proper com- 
pany — who share with her their own inevitable difficulty 
and doubt. But it is not to be wondered at that 
having said so much Ruskin should find it necessary 
to reassure his readers against any possible scruple as 
to the lawfulness of making art look like nature. This, 
however, as a scruple of the moral conscience, need not 
detain us. Incidentally to the same subject he does 
not abate of his estimate of England as " a nation dis- 
tinguished for its general uprightness and faith," al- 
though the English "admit into their architecture more 
of prudence, concealment, and deceit than any other 
[people] of this or of past time." Much more signifi- 
cance, by the way, had on a former page been attributed 
to the poor "exhibitory" shams of the modern Italians; the 
English fault is arbitrarily treated as an inconsistency, the 
Italian, equally arbitrarily, as a consistency quick with 



'THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE.' 9I 

essential implications. Quite removed from these pro- 
vocations to controversy, and easily detachable from the 
ethical question so insistently discussed, is a passage 
of characteristic beauty descriptive of the imaginative 
illusion of the cupola of Parma, where Correggio has 
made a space of some thirty feet diameter "look like 
a cloud-wrapt opening in the seventh heaven, crowded 
with a rushing sea of angels." Ruskin mitigated 
his admiration of Correggio in after years. A little 
later comes the page on tracery, on one salient passage 
whereof I have already dwelt ; and here is another ex- 
quisite example of this incomparably sensitive perception. 
The tracery of the later French Gothic window had 
grown exceedingly delicate ; severe and pure it was 
still, nevertheless, and the material manifestly stiff. 
Yet— 

" At the close of the period of pause, the first sign 
of serious change was like a low breeze, passing through 
the emaciated tracery, and making it tremble. It 
began to undulate like the threads of a cobweb lifted by 
the wind. It lost its essence as a structure of stone. 
. . . The architect was pleased with this new fancy. 
... In a little time the bars of tracery were caused to 
appear to the eye as if they had been woven together 
like a net." 

Of chief importance in the chapter dedicated to "The 
Lamp of Power" is Ruskin's teaching upon the value 
and weight of shadows. He bids the young architect 
learn the habit of thinking in shadow : " Let him 
design with the sense of heat and cold upon him ; 



92 JOHN RUSKIN. 

let him cut out the shadows, as men dig wells in un- 
watered plains." Let him see that the light " is bold 
enough not to be dried up by twilight," and the shadow 
" deep enough not to be dried like a shallow pool by 
a noon - day sun." Magnificent image ! Another 
example of power, intellectually apprehended with a 
historian's philosophy, is in Ruskin's study of that 
Gothic of rejection, the Venetian, which began in the 
luxuriance wherein other architectures have expired, 
which laid aside Byzantine ornaments one by one, 
fixed its own forms " by laws more and more severe," 
and " stood forth, at last, a model of domestic Gothic, 
so grand, so complete, so nobly systematised, that, to 
my mind, there never existed an architecture with so 
stern a claim to our reverence." This judgment also 
was partly renounced afterwards in favour of early 
Lombard work. 

Two distinct characters in architecture had been 
treated in the earlier chapters (with what complex con- 
sistency of teaching, what abundance of thought, and 
what experimental examples, this mere indication of the 
subject and direction of the work does not pretend to 
express) : the one, the impression architecture receives 
from human power ; the other, the image it bears of 
the natural creation. And it is this likeness to the 
" natural creation " that is the subject of the fourth 
chapter, " The Lamp of Beauty." The sanction of all 
the beauty of art, its authority, its appeal, its origin, 
its paragon, abide, as all readers of Ruskin have been 



'THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE.' 93 

told by him in a hundred places, in natural fact. " Be- 
yond a certain point, and that a very low one, man 
cannot advance in the invention of beauty, without 
directly imitating natural form." Furthermore, the 
frequency of a form in nature is, in a sense care- 
fully understood, the measure of its beauty. In other 
words, that which is, in its order and place, frequent, 
easily visible, very manifest, not subject to the con- 
cealing counsels of nature in organic and inorganic 
depths — caverns or living anatomy — that is most 
natural and most beautiful, and the model of decorative 
art. " By frequency I mean that limited and isolated 
frequency which is characteristic of all perfection . , . 
as a rose is a common flower, but yet there are not so 
many roses on a tree as there are leaves." Throughout 
the argument the teacher has searched out his way 
sometimes by quick, sometimes by hard, thinking : but 
never in haste, and never suppressing any part or step 
of the sincere processes of thought. And immediately 
upon this eager but steady inquiry into the sanction of 
artistic beauty comes the passage that surprised the 
world, in condemnation of the Greek fret ; and with 
it one of those keen discoveries that make Ruskin's 
research so brilliant — the discovery that there is a like- 
ness to natural form in the fret, for it is an image of 
the crystals of bismuth ; but that this crystallisation is 
seldom visible, little known, and not even perfectly 
natural, inasmuch it is brought to pass by artificial 
means, the metal being seldom or never found in pure 



94 JOHN RUSKIN. 

condition. But the crystals of salt have a form known 
to almost every man, and it is the crystallisation of 
common salt that sets the example of another design 
in right lines used throughout the Lombard churches 
and drawn with extraordinary beauty by the author, 
rich with shadow. As a result of the same kind of 
casuistic insight (I put the word casuistic to its right 
use) Ruskin condemns the portcullis and all heraldic 
decoration — especially when, as usual, it is repeated. 
The arms are an announcement, and have their place, 
but what they have to tell it is an impertinence to 
tell a score of times. Nor is a motto decorative, 
" since, of all things unlike nature, the forms of letters 
are perhaps the most so." With the same sincere in- 
genuity (here quite unstrained) he explains the vile- 
ness of the ribbon and its unlikeness to grass and 
sea-weed with their anatomy, gradation, direction, and 
allotted size of separate creatures. The ribbon has 
" no strength, no languor. It cannot wave, in the true 
sense, but only flutter ; it cannot bend, but only turn 
and be wrinkled." We are urged to condemn the 
ribbons of Raphael, and do so heartily, even the 
ribbons that tie " Ghiberti's glorious bronze flowers," 
and all the multitudes of scrolls in so far as they are 
used for decoration. Let me add this exquisite phrase 
(from a somewhat paradoxical passage) in description 
of that Mediaeval treatment of drapery which began 
to restore, while it altered, the Antique buoyancy : 
"The motion of the figure only bent into a softer 



'THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE.' 95 

line the stillness of the falling veil, followed by it 
like a slow cloud by drooping rain : only in links 
of lighter undulation it followed the dances of the 
angels." 

The warning against false decorations is necessarily 
a warning also against decoration misplaced. It was 
spoken in 1849. Fifty years later and more, the 
world has become full of violations. Nothing spoken 
by this voice, which spoke after close thought and 
with singular authority, has been disobeyed with a 
more general and more national consent. Ruskin 
pronounced the law that " things belonging to pur- 
poses of active and occupied life" should not be 
decorated. The answer of the public is the Greek 
moulding on shop-fronts, the decoration of the temple 
multiplied in the railway-station, on the counter, in the 
office ; until for disgust we no longer see it, and are 
but aware of some superfluity that is depressing, de- 
graded, vulgar, dishonouring, and tedious — we care 
not what. The country has treated with practical 
contempt the humorous and generous instructor who 
in his youth would have much enjoyed "going through 
the streets of London, pulling down these brackets and 
friezes and large names, restoring to the tradesmen 
the capital they had spent in architecture, and putting 
them on honest and equal terms, each with his name 
in black letters over his door." 

Symmetry, proportion, and colour form the subjects 
of important passages in "The Lamp of Beauty." Ver- 



96 JOHN RUSKIN. 

tical equality, against which a young architect ought 
to be warned in his elementary lesson, Ruskin found 
to be usual in Modern Gothic ; it has not become 
less so in Gothic more modern still. He would have 
symmetry to belong to horizontal, and proportion to 
vertical, division ; symmetry being obviously connected 
with the idea of balance, which is only lateral. Colour 
on a building should be that of an organised creature, 
and the colours of an organised creature are visibly 
independent (this word must serve for lack of a better) 
of the form of its limbs. It is arbitrary, and has a 
plan of its own — the plan of colour. Ruskin would 
not have us give to separate mouldings separate colours, 
nor even to leaves or figures one colour and to the 
ground another. And in general " the best place for 
colour is on broad surfaces, not on spots of interest 
in form." When the colouring is brought to pass 
by the natural hue of blocks of marble, the chequers 
are not to be harmonised or fitted to the forms of 
the windows. As in the Doge's Palace, the front 
should look as if the surface had first been finished, 
and the windows then cut out of it. This rule of 
beauty is distinctly also a rule of power. It is, need- 
less to say, a point of architectural controversy, and 
the doctrine of Ruskin on colour has been held in 
horror. He has on his side the Byzantine builders 
with their perdurable colouring by incrustation, and 
against him Antiquity and most of the northern Gothic 
schools. Then follows the page on Giotto's tower, 



'THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE.' 97 

model of proportion, design, and colour, " coloured like 
a morning cloud and chased like a sea shell" : — 

" And if this be, as I believe it, the model and mirror 
of perfect architecture, is there not something to be 
learned by looking back to the early life of him who 
raised it ? I said that the power of human mind had 
its growth in the Wilderness ; much more must the 
love and the conception of that beauty whose every 
line and hue we have seen to be, at the least, a faded 
image of God's daily work, and an arrested ray of some 
star of creation, be given chiefly in the places which 
He has gladdened by planting the fir tree and the 
pine. Not within the walls of Florence, but among 
the far away fields of her lilies, was the child trained 
who was to raise the headstone of Beauty above her 
towers of watch and war. Remember all that he 
became ; count the sacred thoughts with which he 
filled the heart of Italy ; ask those who followed him 
what they learned at his feet ; and when you have 
numbered his labours, and received their testimony, 
if it seem to you that God had verily poured out upon 
this His servant no common nor restrained portion 
of His Spirit, and that he was indeed a King among 
the children of men, remember also that the legend 
upon his crown was that of David's : ' I took thee 
from the sheep-cote, and from following the sheep.' " 

" No inconsiderable part of the essential character of 
Beauty depends on the expression of vital energy in 
organic things, or on the subjection to such energy 
of things naturally passive and powerless." This is 
amongst the opening sentences of " The Lamp of Life," 
and the theme is rich in the hands of the most vital of 
writers. Even readers in whose ears this eloquence is 

G 



98 JOHN RUSKIN. 

too much inflected, too full of wave, too much moved 
in its beauty to be a perfect style, must confess a 
vitality that makes the vivacity of other authors seem 
but a trivial agitation. Ruskin always carried that 
rich internal burden, a vast capacity of sincerity. 
Others may have been entirely sincere ; and he could 
be no more than entirely sincere. And yet what a 
difference in the degree of integrity ! And the 
measure of this capacity for truth is the measure of 
vitality. It is by force of life that Ruskin hoped, 
in these early works of his, and by force of life 
that he so despaired in the later works as almost to 
persuade himself, for very grief, that he cared no 
longer for the miseries of cities, but was glad to 
enjoy his days in peace. 

The passage on dead architecture is an example of 
the profound misgiving that has beset all prophets, a 
distrust of the world and of its final work ; it is also a 
passage of literature that has cost much. Among 
corrupted styles Ruskin has tolerance of that which is 
animated and unafraid — the Flamboyant design of 
France. And — because the question of life is locked 
(when the sculpture is that of natural form) in the 
question of finish, the student should consult these 
sayings : " Sculpture is not the mere cutting of the 
form of anything in stone ] .it is the cutting of the effect 
of it. The sculptor must paint with his chisel ; half 
his touches are not to realise, but to put power into, the 
form." " The Lamp of Life," with its several argu- 



'THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE.' 99 

ments and its essential significance, is a solemn chapter 
appealing directly to the obligations of immortal man ; 
"The Lamp of Memory," a most delicate one, in which 
the author is all but compelled to say somewhat more 
than he could stand to, and yet unsays no more than a 
note will answer. Except the page in which he had 
bidden men to refrain from decorating a railway station 
(a page that filled the artistic public with an incredulous 
surprise, wherefrom they have hardly yet recovered, 
though, to do them justice, it did not cause them to 
pause in any cast-iron work they might have been 
about), perhaps nothing in The Seven Lamps has been 
found so memorable by the greater number of readers 
as the passage that declares Ruskin's lack of delight in 
an Alpine landscape transposed in fancy to the western 
hemisphere. " The flowers in an instant lost their 
light, the river its music." " Yet not all their light, nor 
all its music," says the note. AVhat then ? Never was 
a thought more certainly doubtful, double, deniable, 
undeniable. Ruskin's description of that landscape — a 
description which, of course, depends for its cogency in 
the argument upon the fact that it takes no note of the 
historical interest of the Alps — is a finished work, 
exquisite with study of leaf and language, but yet not 
effective in proportion to its own beauty and truth. 
Ruskin wrote it in youth, in the impulse of his own 
discovery of language, and of all that English in its 
rich modern freshness could do under his mastery — and 
it is too much, too charged, too anxious. Some sixty 



lOO JOHN RUSKIN. 

lines of " word-painting " are here ; and they are less 
than this line of a poet — 

" Sunny eve in some forgotten place." 

This refraining phrase is of more avail to the imagina- 
tion than the splendid subalpine landscape of The Seven 
Lamps. Another page of this chapter has also become 
famous — that which begins, " Do not let us talk then 
of Restoration. The thing is a lie from beginning to 
end." The last lamp is that of Obedience. (Many 
years later, in Fors Clavigera, Ruskin confesses that he 
had much ado to keep the Lamps to seven, they would 
so easily become eight or nine on his hands.) It con- 
tains, among much fruit of thought, the author's definite 
counsel to the world as to the choice among the logical 
and mature styles of European architecture. He for- 
bids any infantine or any barbarous style, "however 
Herculean their infancy, or majestic their outlawry, 
such as our own Norman, or the Lombard Roman- 
esque." Of the four that are to choose from — the 
Pisan Romanesque, the early Gothic of the Western 
Italian Republics, the Venetian Gothic, and the English 
earliest decorated — the architect is urged to learn the 
laws so surely that he may finally win the right of 
exercising his own liberty and invention. And a mani- 
fold meditation on obedience closes with another recol- 
lection of early religious menace and expectation : — 

" I have paused, not once or twice, as I wrote, and 
often have checked the course of what might otherwise 



'THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE.' lOI 

have been importunate persuasion, as the thought has 
crossed me, how soon all Architecture may he vain, 
except that which is not made with hands. There is 
something ominous in the hght which has enabled us 
to look back with disdain upon the ages among whose 
lovely vestiges we have been wandering. I could smile 
when I hear the hopeful exultation of many, at the new 
reach of worldly science, and vigour of worldly effort — as 
if we were again at the beginning of days. There is 
thunder on the horizon as well as dawn. The sun was 
risen upon the earth when Lot entered Zoar." 

A reader with the world-pitying heart of the world of 
our later day is dismayed at the severity and at the 
calm of this universal threat. The visionary beauty of 
the phrase has none of that grief which is heard in 
the vaticination of another prophetic author, Coventry 
Patmore, who yet menaced not the whole world but 
one degenerate land, foretelling the day when — 

" A dim heroic nation, long since dead, 
The foulness of her agony forgot " — ■ 

England shall be remembered only by her then dead 
language — " the bird-voice and the blast of her omnilo- 
quent tongue." 



I02 



CHAPTER VII. 

'THE STONES OF VENICE' (1851-1853). 

RusKiN, penetrated with a sense of the " baseness of 
the schools of architecture and nearly every other art, 
which have for three centuries been predominant in 
Europe," wrote this book principally in order to convict 
those base schools, locally, in their central degradation. 
Locally, because in Venice, and in Venice only, could the 
Renaissance be effectually reached, judged, and sentenced. 
" Destroy its claims to admiration there " (when Ruskin 
began his work they were triumphant) "and it can 
assert them nowhere else." He intended to make the 
Stones of Venice touchstones, and to detect, " by the 
mouldering of her marble, poison more subtle than 
ever was betrayed by the rending of her crystal." 
And beyond this — one of the most interesting and 
definite motives that ever urged the making of a book 
— stands the inevitable argument of his life : " Men 
are intended, without excessive difficulty, ... to knov/ 
good things from bad." 

The work is thus local because the " festering lily " 



•the stones of VENICE.' 103 

of Shakespeare had its unique fouhiess in Venice. 
That city had been in an early age of her long history 
the central meeting-place of the Lombard from the 
north and the Arab from the south over the wreck 
of the Roman empire. It was through this fruitful 
encounter that the Ducal Palace became " the central 
building of the world." All European architecture 
derives from Greece, through Rome, and the condi- 
tions of place and of race bring to pass the all-unique 
variety of derivation. In Venice the variety was also 
all-important ; and Ruskin begins the study of the 
art in its rise, greatness, decline, and last corruption, 
by a brief but large history of this nation, standing, 
as a sea-nation, a ruin between Tyre (no more than 
a memory) and England still imperial. He divides 
the national life of Venice, between the nine hundred 
years from her foundation (421 a.d.) and the five 
hundred years of her decline and fall, by the measure 
called the Serrar del Consiglio, which finally and 
fatally distinguished the nobles from the commonalty, 
and withdrew the power from the people and the 
Doge alike. " Ah, well done, Venice ! Wisdom this, 
indeed ! " had been Ruskin's note to Sansovino's 
summary of the constitution of Venice before the 
Serrar del Consiglio : " She found means to commit 
the government not to one, not to few, not to many, 
but to the many good, to the few better, and to the 
best one." Ruskin places the beginning of the decline 
in 141 8; so that even her religious painters came later. 



104 JOHN RUSKIN. 

and her great school about a century later, more or 
less. The sensitive arts of architecture and sculpture 
seem to have taken the mortal hurt more quickly than 
the art of painting, incorrupt in Venice later than else- 
where by reason of the life of its incomparable colour. 
In the introductory chapter, " The Quarry," Ruskin 
gives us that instance of the tombs of the two Doges 
which is an example of the great essential contention 
of the book. The one tomb, not primitive, not al- 
together fine, an early fifteenth - century work, has a 
nobility yet unforegone ; the other, half a century 
later, is the tomb of Andrea Vendramin, the most 
costly ever bestowed on a Venetian monarch, praised 
by popular taste and authoritative criticism with all 
their superlatives, while the other was contemned. 
Climbing to see more of this later effigy, which he per- 
ceived to be ignoble, Ruskin found that the much 
vaunted sculptured hand, in sight, had no fellow but 
a block, and so with the aged brow, wrinkled only 
where it might be seen, the aged cheek, smooth, and 
also distorted, where it lay out of sight. Ruskin would 
have had nothing but praise for treatment of sculpture 
according to the position of the effigy ; but this was 
another matter. 

" Who, with a heart in his breast, could have stayed 
his hand, as he reached the bend of the grey forehead, 
and measured out the last veins of it as so much the 
zecchin ? " 

It was not necessary that Ruskin should follow up 



'THE STONES OF VENICE.' IO5 

this sculptor and find him condemned for forgery ; 
his own sentence strikes close enough. 

The lesson on architecture that follows is offered to 
a reader who is to be taught to build and to decorate, 
and who, in order thereto, is to be set free from the 
poor fiction — is it even so much ? has it life enough 
for feigning ? — that the decorations of the modern 
world are delightful to man. " Do you seriously 
imagine," asks our teacher, " that any living soul in 
London likes triglyphs ? . . . Greeks did : English 
people never did, and never will." 

" The first thing we have to ask of decoration is that 
it should indicate strong liking. . . . The old Lom- 
bard architects liked hunting ; so they covered their 
work with horses and hounds. . . . The base Renais- 
sance architects liked masquing and fiddling ; so they 
covered their work with comic masks and musical in- 
struments. Even that was better than our English way 
of liking nothing and professing to like triglyphs." 

Ruskin calls upon us for deliberate question and up- 
right answer as to our affections. 

But first comes the long historical lesson on con- 
struction : on the wall, which is so built that it is 
not " dead wall " ; on the pier, the base, the shaft, 
with a special emphasis upon the transition from the 
actual to the apparent cluster, illustrated by plans ; 
on arch masonry, the arch load, the roof, and the 
buttress. Of all this, obviously, no indication in this 
summary is possible. The introductory lesson on 



Io6 JOHN RUSKIN. 

decoration is another version of the often - repeated 
teaching on natural form. 

" All the lovely forms of the universe . . . whence 
to choose, and all the lovely lines that bound their 
substance or guide their motion. . . . There is material 
enough in a single flower for the ornament of a score of 
cathedrals : but suppose we were satisfied with less ex- 
haustive appliance, and built a score of cathedrals each 
to illustrate a single flower ? that would be better than 
trying to invent new styles, I think. There is quite 
difference of style enough, between a violet and a hare- 
bell, for all reasonable purposes." 

Who can read such a passage and not have gained a 
new felicity ? We owe the exquisite thought and phrase 
(at least in regard to its occasion) to that folly of the 
time wherein the book was written— the hope that a 
new kind of architecture was to come to pass through 
the initiative of the Crystal Palace. John Ruskin con- 
sents to pause and refute that idle boast. " The earth 
hath bubbles as the water hath," he says of the Syden- 
ham " palace," " and this is of them." To return to 
this inexhaustible theme of the natural form ; Ruskin 
opposes Garnett, a writer who commends art (as writers 
on art have done at least every ten years since then) 
for its correction of nature. Art, according to Garnett, 
is to criticise nature by her own rules gathered from 
all her works, and he quotes the saying recorded of 
Raphael, " that the artist's object was to make things 
not as nature made them but as nature would make 
them." Ruskin replies : — 



'THE STONES OF VENICE.' lO/ 

" I had thought that, by this time, we had done with 
that stale . . . and misunderstood saying. . . . Raffaelle 
was a painter of humanity, and assuredly there is some- 
thing the matter with humanity, a few dovrebbe's more 
or less, wanting in it. We have most of us heard of 
original sin, and may perhaps, in our modest moments, 
conjecture that we are not quite what God, or Nature, 
would have us to be. Raffaelle had something to 
mend in humanity : I should have liked to have seen 
him mending a daisy, or a pease-blossom, or a moth." 

Then follows a page on the succession of the waves 
of the irregular sea. Not one of these hits " the great 
ideal shape," the corrected shape, nor will if we watch 
them for a thousand years. 

In the appendix to the first volume we may read 
much theology of Ruskin's own writing and of his 
father's, directed against the idea of a teaching Church, 
and showing him to be so docile a son as to follow his 
father not only in regard to " eternal interests " but also 
in regard to temporal prosperity. If you care little for 
the first, says the elder Ruskin in effect, you must needs 
care for the second, and Protestantism means the wealth 
of nations. Not many years later, when he wrote Unto 
this Last, John Ruskin had thought his own thoughts 
on the wealth of nations, and his father was amongst 
the dismayed readers. A more valuable page of the 
appendix is that which declares the rapid judgment to 
which Ruskin intends by Stones of Venice to train the 
reader — or rather for which he intends to set the reader 
free — to be attainable in painting as well as in archi- 



I08 JOHN RUSKIN. 

lecture. We ought by a side glance, as we walk down 
a gallery, to tell a good painting ; because, as in archi- 
tecture structure and expression are united, so in painting 
are execution and expression. Who will say, after this, 
that Ruskin sought too much for symbolism and allusion 
and the less pictorial characters of art? "The business 
of a painter is to paint." He gave years of his life to 
Veronese, in whom the emotions were altogether sub- 
ordinate. In fact, Ruskin is the most liberal and uni- 
versal of all lovers and critics of art, having eyes for all 
manners as for all matters. 

" A man long trained to love the monk's visions of 
Angelico turns in proud and ineffable disgust from the 
first work of Rubens ... he encounters across the 
Alps. . . . He has forgotten that while Angelico prayed 
and wept . . . there was different work doing in the 
dank fields of Flanders ; — wild seas to be banked out ; 
. . . hard ploughing and harrowing of the frosty clay ; 
careful breeding of stout horses and fat cattle, . . . rough 
affections and sluggish imaginations, fleshy, substantial, 
iron-shod humanities. . . . And are we to suppose there 
is no nobility in Rubens ? masculine and universal sym- 
pathy with all this ? . . . On the other hand, a man 
trained ... in our Sir Joshua school will not and 
cannot allow that there is any art at all in the technical 
work of Angelico. . . . We have been taught in England 
to think there can be no virtue but in a loaded brush 
and rapid hand ; but . . . there is art also in the deli- 
cate point and in the hand which trembles as it moves, 
not because it is more liable to err but because there is ' 
more danger in its error." 

In the second volume the study of St Mark's is 



'THE STONES OF VENICE.' 109 

prefaced by that of the churches of Torcello and of 
Murano, those ancient villages whence in part Venice 
received her people. It is in the marble-mosaic Murano 
pavement of 1 140 — "one of the most precious monu- 
ments in Italy " — that the eye which replied with the 
splendour of its gift of vision to the splendour of the 
Venetian brush discovered the first Venetian colour. 
As to Byzantine building Ruskin teaches us the im- 
portance of this fact-^that it is a style of " confessed 
incrustation," and shows us how far this fact carries. 
Venice on her islands, hard by a sandy and marshy 
coast, and in traffic with the East, built with the meaner 
materials and faced them with the marbles of her 
commerce. Her coloured architecture became rather 
flat, rather small, as well as precious, carrying porphyry, 
alabaster, and gold, and later the less perdurable but 
more precious colours of her painters. Incrustation is 
obviously " the only permanent chromatic decoration 
possible," as we know who trace with mixed feelings 
the vestiges of the Gothic painter at Bourges and at 
Winchester, in chocolate and green. Here, at St Mark's, 
is no opaque surface-painting of the painter's mixing, 
but the colour of nature in jasper and marble, into 
which the light makes some way : " marbles that half 
refuse and half yield to the sunshine, Cleopatra -like, 
their ' bluest veins to kiss.' " Certain characters of 
construction and of decoration are implied by in- 
crustation : for example, the delicacy that is to dis- 
tinguish the plinths and cornices used for binding this 



no JOHN RUSKIN. 

rich armature from those that are essential parts of 
the sohd building ; the abandonment of nearly all ex- 
pression in the body of the building, except that of 
strength, so that the Byzantine building shows no anxiety 
to disturb open surfaces ; the solidity of the shafts, how- 
ever precious in material, as an instinctive amends for 
the thinness of the precious surface on the walls ; and 
the consequent variable size of the shafts, as rubies in 
a carcanet have the differences proper to their single 
values, and the emeralds of two ear-rings are not abso- 
lutely alike ; shallow cutting of the decoration, so that 
here are none of the hollows and hiding-places proper 
to the stone-work of the north. On this serene and 
sunny construction the decorator worked as one who 
traces a fine drawing, subduing and controlling figure 
and drapery to the surface of his film of marble. Little 
have they read this book who currently discuss the 
fanaticism of Ruskin in the matter of " truth," and 
charge him with so bigoted a love of integrity as to 
forbid the use of a marble surface on a construction of 
commoner substance; an architect accuses him of this 
to-day as easily as a painter to-morrow will aver that 
Ruskin did not permit him to choose what he would 
record, but compelled him to record all that was before 
him. It is as the chief of the lovers of colour that 
Ruskin is the apologist of an incrusted church simply 
condemned as " ugly " by the taste of the guides of the 
world — that St Mark's which was to him "a confusion 
of delight," a " chain of language and life," that St Mark's 



'THE STONES OF VENICE.' Ill 

which he read, not in Gothic darkness and effort, but 
clearly, with the clearness of white dome and sky. No 
sign of carelessness of heart, to him, was the colour of 
Venice, but a solemn investiture. As to the form, I 
may do no more here than record the little spray of 
leaves he draws on a page of Stones of Venice, with 
a subtle difference in the progression of the propor- 
tions amongst the seven leaves ; and when you are 
penetrated with the grace of these single things in their 
inter-relation, you read that these are the proportions of 
the facade of St Mark's. Who but he has given a reader 
such a happy moment ? And as for the Byzantine spirit, 
he cries, of St Mark's, " No city had such a Bible." He 
perceives in it 

" that mighty humanity, so perfect and so proud, that 
hides no weakness beneath the mantle, and gains no 
greatness from the diadem ; the majesty of thoughtful 
form, on which the dust of gold and flame of jewels 
are dashed, as the sea-spray upon the rock, and still 
the great Manhood seems to stand bare against the 
sky." 

The following section, on the nature of Gothic, is one 
of the most important chapters of Ruskin's architectural 
work. 

Let it be remembered that he chose the Gothic 
of Venice for the sake of its local succession to this 
local Byzantine work. But he prefaces the lesson 
with a study of universal Gothic, — the Gothic of such 
almost abstract quality as would be difficult to define, 



112 JOHN RUSKIN. 

even as red would be difficult to describe to one who 
had not seen it, but who must be told that it was the 
colour mingled with blue to make this violet, and with 
yellow to make yonder orange. Universal Gothic, like 
other great architecture, began with artless utterance. 

" It is impossible to calculate the enormous loss 
of power in modern days owing to the imperative re- 
quirement that art shall be methodical and learned." 

For there will always be " more intellect than there 
can be education." But Gothic was in a special 
manner the work of the savage intellect, of the inventor, 
the intellectual workman ; it has not the same word 
to repeat, but the perpetual novelty of life. And, to 
the Gothic workman, living foliage — no longer the 
mere "explanatory accessory" of Lombardic or Roman- 
esque sculpture — became "a subject of intense affec- 
tion." Here is an incomparable Ruskin thought : 
the love of change, he tells us, that was in the char- 
acter of the Gothic sculptor, restless in following the 
hunt or the battle, " is at once soothed and satisfied 
as it watches the wandering of the tendril, and the 
budding of the flower." And here a Ruskin phrase, also 
in its place incomparable : " Greek and Egyptian 
ornament is either mere surface engraving ... or its 
lines are flowing, lithe, and luxuriant. . . . But the 
Gothic ornament stands out in prickly independence 
and frosty fortitude, jutting into crockets, and freezing 
into pinnacles," In the same chapter is, amongst others, 



•THE STONES OF VENICE.' I13 

an admirable page upon redundanee as a quality, not, 
needless to say, of all fine Gothic, but of the Gothic 
that \s most full of all Gothic qualities, and especially 
the Gothic quality of humility : " That humility which 
is the very life of the Gothic school is shown not 
only in the imperfection, but in the accumulation, of 
ornament." 

With the selfsame care are the many Gothic con- 
structions of Venice discovered by Ruskin's research 
as the few Byzantine ; nearly all, except the Ducal 
Palace, suffer from " the continual juxtaposition of 
the Renaissance palaces ; . . . they exhaust their own 
life by breathing it into the Renaissance coldness." 
The Ducal Palace, according to Ruskin, was a work of 
sudden Gothic. It is unlike the true transitional work 
done between the final cessation of pure Byzantine 
building, about 1300, and its own date — 1320 to 1350. 
The struggle between Byzantine and Gothic (formed 
on the mainland) had been one of equals, equally 
organised and vital. Ruskin shows us the brilliant 
contest, with here and there a bit of true Gothic tangled 
and taken prisoner till its friends should come up and 
sustain it. And of the Gothic victory the English 
reader (Ruskin writes, in spite of all, for the ultra- 
English reader, the insular, the suburban, the very 
churchwarden) should note that the Venetian houses 
were the refined and ornate dwellings of "a nation 
as laborious, as practical, as brave, and as prudent as 
ourselves. ... At Venice, . . . Vicenza, Padua, and 

H 



114 JOHN RUSKIN. 

Verona the traveller may ascertain, by actual experience, 
the effect which would be produced upon the comfort 
and luxury of daily life by the revival of Gothic 
architecture"; he may see the unruined traceries against 
the summer sky, or " may close the casements fitted 
to their unshaken shafts against such wintry winds 
as would have made an English house vibrate to 
its foundations." " I trust," said Ruskin, and his 
lesson has in part been learnt since then, " that 
there will come a time when the English people 
may see the folly of building basely and insecurely." 
The reader is led then at last to the Ducal Palace, 
and, in honour of its sculptures, to a chapter on 
that great book of the Virtues as the Christian Venice 
honoured them ; from that chapter I must save this 
sentence on Plato — that the " moral virtues may be 
found in his writings defined in the most noble manner, 
as a great painter defines his figures, without oiitli?ies.^^ 

When Gothic architecture came to the conquest of 
Byzantine in Venice, both were noble ; but when, 
in a later age, the Renaissance architecture attacked the 
Gothic, neither was purely noble. Ruskin shows us 
that "unless luxury had enervated and subtlety falsified 
the Gothic forms, Roman traditions could not have pre- 
vailed against them." The corrupt Gothic had become 
luxurious ; " in some of the best Gothic . . . there is 
hardly an inch of stone left unsculptured " ; hui the 
decadent Gothic is at once extravagant and jaded. 
Against this degraded architecture "came the Renais- 



'THE STONES OF VENICE.' II5 

sance armies ; and their first assault was in the re- 
quirement of universal perfection." The Renaissance 
workmen lost originality of thought and tenderness of 
feeling, for the sake of their dexterity of touch and 
accuracy of knowledge. 

"The thought and the feeling which they despised 
departed from them, and they were left to felicitate 
themselves on their small science and their neat 
fingering. This is the history of the first attack of 
the Renaissance upon the Gothic schools. . . . Now 
do not let me be misunderstood when I speak generally 
of the evil spirit of the Renaissance. The reader . . . 
will not find one word but of the most profound rever- 
ence for those mighty men who could wear the Renais- 
sance armour of proof, and yet not feel it encumber 
their living limbs — Leonardo and Michael Angelo, 
Ghirlandajo and Masaccio, Titian and Tintoret. But 
I speak of the Renaissance as an evil time, because, 
when it saw those men go burning forth into the battle, 
it mistook their armour for their strength ; and forth- 
with encumbered with the painful panoply every stripling 
who ought to have gone forth only with his own choice 
of three smooth stones out of the brook." 

Full of significance (I must take but one detail from 
this history of decline) is the fact that even in the 
finest examples of early Renaissance, where it was 
mingled with reminiscences of the Byzantine chromatic 
work, the coloured marble was no longer a simple part 
of the masonry but was framed and represented as 
hanging by ribbons. Of the central architecture of 
the Renaissance, the Casa Grimani stands, in Ruskin's 
noble praises, as the best example. With the Vicenza 



Il6 JOHN RUSKIN. 

Town Hall, with St Peter's, Whitehall, and St Paul's, 
this palace represents the building that has been set 
before the student, from the date of its invention to 
the day of the writing of the Stones of Venice, as the 
antagonist of the barbarous genius. None the less 
was it a sign of the general withdrawal of architecture 
into " earthliness, out of all that was warm and 
heavenly." In its central works the Venetian Re- 
naissance set up statues of the ancient Venetian virtues 
Temperance and Justice ; but these figures were fur- 
nished — as neither the left hand of the one nor the 
right hand of the other could be seen from below — 
with one hand each. 

"Its dragons are covered with marvellous scales, but 
have no terror or sting in them ; its birds are perfect in 
plumage, but have no song in them ; its children are 
lovely of limb, but have no childishness in them." 

The effigies upon its tombs evaded the thought 
of death ; its figure of the dead first indented the 
pillow " naturally," then rose on its elbow and looked 
about it, and finally stepped out of the tomb for 
public applause, not with virtues, but with fame and 
victory, for companions. Ruskin takes us, through 
the stages of corruption, to the curtains and ropes, 
fringes, tassels, cherubs, the impotence of expression, 
the passionless folly, of the seventeenth century, more 
foul in Venice than elsewhere as the thing corrupted 
had been the best. InfideUty, Pride of State, Pride 
of System (or the confidence of definitely observable 



'THE STONES OF VENICE.' II7 

laws that never enabled man to do a great thing, 
and albeit literature and painting could break through, 
architecture could not) — these were the causes of the 
derogation of Venice. The rod had blossomed, pride 
had budded, violence had ristn up. The chapter 
following this on the Roinan Renaissance deals with 
the Grotesque of the Renaissance ; it shows us the 
mocking head — inhuman, weak, and finely finished — 
carved upon the base of the tower of Santa Maria 
Formosa, one of many hundreds to be found upon 
the later buildings. As the grotesque was, to Ruskin's 
mind, at its noblest in Dante (yet heaven help us, 
wretched race of man, if Dante's laugh is to be our 
mirth !) so it was at its thinnest and most malicious 
in Renaissance ornament in Venice. That ornament 
closes the architecture of Europe. 

But the conclusion of this great book is an appeal 
not to despair, but to the hope of the race. It is a 
race still in its infancy, says John Ruskin, if we may 
take as tokens of puerility its foolish condemnation of 
the only work of art (Turner's) that was true to the 
science and truth professed by the age ; its mis- 
understanding of social and economic principles, so 
that it preached those impossibilities "liberty" and 
" equality," and yet in no single nation dared to shut 
up its custom-houses ; its profession of charity and 
self-sacrifice for the practice of individual man and 
its rejection thereof for the practice of the State. If 
mankind, then, was childish, it might be taught. And 



Il8 JOHN RUSKIN. 

how much, in by-ways of opinion, the world did learn 
from Ruskin, of true learning, may be seen from an 
incident of this last chapter, in which he rebukes the 
painters of his day for painting Italy without olive- 
trees ! This they did because their teachers thought 
trees ought not to be known from one another, and 
you certainly cannot make olives like any other tree 
of the hillside. " The very school which carries its 
science in the representation of man down to the 
dissection of the most minute muscle, refuses so much 
science to the drawing of a tree as shall distinguish 
one species from another." Then follows a magnificent 
apology for the barbaric olive as the dome of St Mark's 
has it, and this allusion to the trees of the painters : — 

"A few strokes of the pencil, or dashes of colour, will 
be enough to enable the imagination to conceive a tree ; 
and in those dashes of colour Sir Joshua Reynolds 
would have rested, and would have suffered the imagina- 
tion to paint what more it liked for itself, and grow oaks, 
or olives, or apples, out of the few dashes of colour at its 
leisure. On the other hand, Hobbema, one of the worst 
of the reahsts, smites the imagination on the mouth, 
and bids it be silent, while he sets to work to paint his 
oak of the right green." 

The painters of to-day, worthy the name, paint olives, 
and the world has been changed in other ways ; but it 
has not begun to restore a great time. 

For to the book, in so far as it is a book of persuasion, 
there is this reply, and against it this contention : that 
it persuades to that whereto no man nor men can attain 



'THE STONES OF VENICE.' I 19 

by any means they can be persuaded to lay hands upon. 
The German painters, for example, of the Overbeck 
school had doubtless a good will to paint as they should, 
and as Ruskin's teaching would approve. But here is 
what he very rightly thought of them : — 

" I know not anything more melancholy than the sight 
of the German cartoon, with its objective side and its 
subjective side ; and mythological division and sym- 
bolical division ; its allegorical sense and literal sense 
and ideal point of view and intellectual point of view 
its heroism of well-made armour and knitted brows . . . 
and twenty innocent dashes of the hand of one God- 
made painter, poor old Bassano or Bonifazio, were worth 
it all, and worth it ten thousand times over." 

Whereto, then, is the persuasion of this book directed ? 
As a book of history and of meditation on character and 
art it does its work ; but does it not itself show us that 
as a book of persuasion it can do no work, for there is 
no work to be done? Is a man to be persuaded, con- 
vinced, or converted to be such a man as this of Ruskin's 
description ? 

" It is no more art to lay on colour delicately than to 
lay on acid [the acid of the photographer is meant] deli- 
cately. It is no more art to use the cornea and retina 
for the reception of an image than to use a lens and a 
piece of silvered paper. But the moment that inner 
part of the man, or rather that entire and only being of 
the man, of which cornea and retina, fingers and hands, 
pencils and colours, are all the mere servants and instru- 
ments ; that manhood which has light in itself, though 
the eyeball be sightless, and can gain in strength when 



T20 JOHN RUSKIN. 

the hand and the foot are hewn off and cast into the 
fire ; the moment this part of the man stands forth with 
its solemn ' Behold, it is I,' then the work becomes art 
indeed." 

In the preface to the third edition (1874) Ruskin 
confesses that his book had gained an influence, for 
Englishmen had begun to mottle their manufactory 
chimneys with black and red, and to adorn their banks 
and drapers' shops with A^enetian tracery, but the chief 
purpose of the writing, which was to show the moral 
corruption as cause of the corruption of art, had been 
altogether neglected. 

" As a physician would . . . rather hear that his 
patient had thrown all his medicine out of the window, 
than that he had sent word to his apothecary to leave 
out two of its three ingredients, so I would rather, for 
my own part, that no architects had ever condescended 
to adopt one of the views suggested in this book." 

At the close of Stones of ]^e)iice he complains once 
more that all readers praised the style and none the 
substance. 

" If . . , I had told, as a more egoistic person would, 
my own impressions, as thinking those, forsooth, and not 
the history of Venice, the most important business, . . . 
a large number of equally egoistic persons would have 
instantly felt the sincerity of the selfishness, clapped it, 
and stroked it, and said ' That's me.' " 

The truth he had to tell he declares to have been 
" denied and detested." 



'THE STONES OF VENICE.' 121 

Finally, a somewhat whimsical last page is filled with 
an extract from his diary of 1845, showing that he too 
could write like a critic of "chiaroscuro and other 
artistic qualities," but that he kept such observations 
for the furnishing of his own science rather than for 
presentation to the public. And in the appendix to 
Sfo/ies of Venice is an invaluable essay on the Venetian 
pictures. 



122 



CHAPTER VIII, 

•PRE-RAPHAELITISM' (1851). 

When the pictures of the young " pre - Raphaelite 
brethren " first appeared in the London exhibitions, 
the newspapers made loud complaints. Of pictures by 
Millais and Holman Hunt at the Academy the Times 
said : " These young artists have unfortunately become 
notorious by addicting themselves to an antiquated style 
and an affected simplicity of painting. . . . We can 
extend no toleration to a mere senile ^ imitation of the 
cramped style, false perspective, and crude colour of 
remote antiquity. . . . That morbid infatuation which 
sacrifices truth, beauty, and genuine feeling to mere 
eccentricity deserves no quarter at the hands of the 
public." Ruskin then wrote to the Times two letters, 
signed " The Author of Modern Painters," protesting 
that^the pictures in question were not false whether in 

^ The word is "senile" in early and late editions of Ruskin, but 
it is a strange word wherewith to rate young painters. The ad- 
jective you can read with your eyes shut, to go with "imitation," 
is "servile." 



'PRE-RAPIIAELITISM.' 1 23 

feeling or perspective, that their laboriousness entitled 
ihem to more than a hasty judgment, and that great 
things might be expected of the painters. He blames 
them for looking too narrowly, and he perceives a 
flowing and an impulse in nature that outstrips such 
slow labours as theirs ; but his praises of their execu- 
tion, in its kind, and of their colour, are large. " I 
have no acquaintance with any of these artists, and very 
imperfect sympathy with them," says the first letter ; the 
apology was undertaken for the love of natural truth, 
evidently dear to the new painters. The Tiiues letters 
were followed immediately by a pamphlet. The 
pre-Raphaelite brethren, says the preface, had been 
assailed " with the most scurrilous abuse which I ever 
recollect seeing issue from the press " (it must be owned 
that Ruskin's angry sentence is ill-written in three 
places) ; and the contention that follows is exceedingly 
interesting for reasons that seem to have escaped its 
readers. That is, Ruskin has always been represented 
as the champion of a group of young men of talent. 
This he was, and a generous one ; he declared their 
work to be the " most earnest and complete " done 
in Europe since the day of Albert Diirer. But the 
pamphlet is by no means, in its essential argument, the 
eulogy of young men of talent. It is a frank proposal 
to young men of industry that they should apply them- 
selves modestly to painting pictures of topographic, 
historic, scientific, or botanic interest pour serz'ir. 
Ruskin is accused of seeing "genius" too readily; but 



124 JOHN RUSKIN, 

there could hardly be a more candid declaration (it was 
too candid to be altogether understood) that genius was 
not to be looked for. The author of Pre-RapJiaeUtism 
says in effect that what is to be demanded of a multi- 
tude of painters (who can be no more than workmen, 
and ought to be good workmen) is a trustworthy and 
useful record of contemporary things having an un- 
pictorial interest. He says farther on : — 

" Many people have found fault with me for not 
' teaching people how to arrange masses ' ; for not 
' attributing sufficient importance to composition.' 
Alas ! I attribute far more importance to it than they 
do — so much importance that I should just as soon 
think of sittting down to teach a man how to write a 
Divina Commedia or King Lear, as how to ' compose,' 
in the true sense, a single building or picture." 

Such a comparison doubtless goes too far, or rather 
goes wrong, as demonstrations borrowed from each 
other by the arts must always do ; for certainly there 
are things to be taught to a painter that have no 
counterpart in any things possible to teach to a poet. 
But I quote the passage in sign of the curious conten- 
tion — it reappears in the first Slade lectures — that the 
majority of painters would do well to content them- 
selves with pictures that are hardly pictures. Nothing 
more humiliating was ever said of modern art ; it was 
so humiliating that no one would consent to under- 
stand it ; it was indeed too humiliating to be just. 



' rRE-RAPIIAELlTISM.' I 25 

The pre - Raphaelite pamphlet changes, after the 
introductory page, into a history of the art of Turner. 
Particularly instructive here is the history of the evolu- 
tion of Turner's whole art of colour, from the kind of 
colour-stenography of the beginning ; and excellent also 
the history of Turner's sympathy, of his ready admira- 
tions, of the help he consented to receive from weak 
painters, such as Claude, and refused from strong but 
more false painters, such as Salvator Rosa. 

" Besides, he had never seen classical life, and Claude 
was represented to him as a competent authority for it. 
But he had seen mountains and torrents, and knew 
therefore that Salvator could not paint them." 

In iSoo, facing the Continental landscape for himself. 
Turner cast Claude and the rest away, once for all, and 
relied upon his eagle eye, his Imagination, and his 
" gigantic memory." Turner, says Ruskin, forgot him- 
self, and forgot nothing else. 

The Times letters of 1851 were followed by a letter, 
in 1854, in praise of Mr Holman Hunt's "Light of the 
World"; and in this place — although it belongs to a 
much later date — may also be mentioned the paper on 
" The Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism " {Nineteenth 
Century^ 1878), memorable for the happy passage upon 
that picture which corrupt criticism used to call the 
greatest in the world. Ruskin rehearses his former 
grave accusation of Raphael, that he confused and 



126 JOHN RUSKIN. 

quenched the "veracities of the life of Christ"; and 
adds : — 

" Raphael, . . . after profoundly studying the 
arabesques of Pompeii and of the palace of the Ccesars, 
beguiled the tedium, and illustrated the spirituality, of 
the converse of Moses and Elias with Christ concerning 
His decease which He should accomplish at Jerusalem, 
by placing them, above the Mount of Transfiguration, 
in the attitudes of two humming-birds on the top of a 
honeysuckle." 



12/ 



CHAPTER IX. 

'LECTURES OiNT ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING' 

(1853)- 

John Ruskin's career as a lecturer began at Edinburgh 
with a course of two lectures on architecture and two 
on painting. It was to take him later to the Slade 
chair at Oxford, to the Oxford Museum, to the Royal 
Institution, the London Institution, the South Ken- 
sington Museum, to Cambridge, Eton, Manchester, 
Birmingham, Liverpool, Kendal, Bradford, Dublin, 
Tunbridge Wells, Woolwich, and into the lecture rooms 
of University College, Christ's Hospital, the Lambeth 
School of Art, St Martin's School of Art, the Working 
Men's College, the Architectural Association, the Society 
of Arts, the Society of Antiquaries — and the list is not 
complete. This first appearance on the platform was 
made with the utmost charm of address, although the 
matter was controversial, and controversy followed. 
" I come before you," a passage in the second lecture 
avows, " professedly to speak of things forgotten or 
things disputed." And his opponents joined issue with 



128 JOHN RUSKTN. 

him on the importance of architectural ornament, on 
its place, on the union of architect and sculptor in 
one, and, in general, on the Gothic city. For it was 
to the Gothic city that Ruskin intended to persuade his 
Modern Athens. He set forth with a comparison of 
Edinburgh with Verona — the one city whereof the beauty 
lay without, and the other whereof it lay without and 
within. To be beautiful, a town must be domestically 
beautiful, beautiful cumulatively in its dwellings, beau- 
tiful successively along its streets. 

" The great concerted music of the streets . . . when 
turret rises over turret, and casement frowns beyond 
casement, and tower succeeds to tower along the farthest 
ridges of the inhabited hills — this is a sublimity of which 
you can at present form no conception." 

"Neither the mind nor the eye," he says elsewhere, 
" will accept a new college, or a new hospital, or a new 
institution, for a city " ; and a fine church in a vile street 
is nothing but a superstition. Therefore he would rouse 
the citizens against their Ionic and Corinthian column, 
repeated without delight ; and defending once again — - 
it is central to his teaching — the theory of the certainties 
of beauty, he says : — 

"Examine well the channels of your admiration, and 
you will find that they are, in verity, as unchangeable as 
the channels of your heart's blood." 

Ruskin recommends the pointed window-opening for 
its greater strength. The common cross lintel is of a 
form that wastes strength, when it is strong, which, in 



'ON ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING.' 1 29 

modern building, is not often. And the pseudo-Greek 
decoration is wasted as well as the power, by its position 
at the top of the building. Pediments, stylobates, and 
architraves are dead. Fine Gothic is as various as 
nature's foliage, and this Ruskin illustrates by an ex- 
quisite lesson on the leaves of the mountain ash ; a 
sculptor should not repeat his sculpture, as a painter 
should not paint the same picture. Moreover, fine 
Gothic ornament is visible ; it is chiefly rich about the 
doors, it is rough at a height above the eye ; only in the 
degraded Gothic of Milan cathedral are the statues on 
the roof cut delicately. 

" Be assured that ' handling ' is as great a thing in 
marble as in paint, and that the power of producing a 
masterly effect with few touches is as essential in an 
architect as in a draughtsman." 

Thus he does not urge upon the modern citizen a 
costly manner of architecture, but resigns himself, since 
he must, to the poverty or penury of a society and age 
strangely given to boast of riches. The Gothic of 
dwellings is one with the Gothic church ; the apse of 
Amiens is " but a series of windows surmounted by 
pure gables of open work " ; the spire, the pointed 
tower of South Switzerland, are but the roof, which 
ought always to be very visible, made yet more visible. 

" Have not those words Pinnacle, Turret, Belfry, 
Spire, Tower, a pleasant sound in all your ears ? . . . 
Do you think there is any group of words which would 
thus interest you when the things expressed by them 
are uninteresting?" 



130 JOHN RUSKIN. 

Some expense of controversy seems to be hardly 
worth while in Ruskin's contention that " ornamentation 
is the principal part of architecture considered as a fine 
art." For when the word "principal" is thoroughly 
explained, nothing is left in the proposition but what 
most architects would be willing to accept. 

"A Gothic cathedral is properly to be defined as a 
piece of the most magnificent associative sculpture 
arranged on the noblest principles of building." 

But this principle is pushed far by Ruskin when he 
adds that architecture may be defined as " the art of 
designing sculpture for a particular place, and placing 
it there on the best principles of building." Archi- 
tecture, said his opponents, is '•'■ par excellence the art of 
proportion," So, rejoined Ruskin, is all art in the 
world, and none par excellence ; all art depends from 
the beginning upon proportion for its existence, and 
Gothic has more proportions than other architecture, 
having a greater number of members. 

The final lesson of the lectures is that Gothic with 
its liberal variety and interest " implies the liberty of 
the workman." Such a plea Ruskin thought would 
have won some reply from the modern heart ; but 
it elicited none. 

The two lectures on painting deal, the one with 
Turner and Claude (ground trodden in Modern Painters), 
and the other with the reforms attempted by the 
English pre-Raphaelites. 



131 



CHAPTER X. 

♦ELEMENTS OF DRAWING' (1857). 

The three Letters to Beginners printed with this title 
require of the learner a simple discipleship and con- 
fidence — not blind, for everything is shown him in 
time, but expectant, and with good reasons for being 
intellectually predisposed to receive this instruction 
rather than another. It would be well to warn a 
student in Ruskin's drawing-class to look well to those 
reasons and to be sure they are good ; for the teaching ' 
is intolerant of mixture with any other methods. That 
teaching, merely as it stands in this small book — lost 
in the astonishing quantity of its author's labours of 
the mind — proves an entire system of thought and 
practice, justified by pure principle and by the analysis 
of the work of masters. But the modern reader may 
wonder whether, a painter having been duly born, but 
having yet to be made, he would have a chance of 
being well made under the guidance of this book. Let 
no one think that if there were failure it would be the 
consequence of too literary a quality of instruction, 



132 JOHN RUSKIN. 

and of the influence of a literary mind ; Ruskin's 
work in these letters is artist's work, designer's and 
painter's work ; Ruskin is more sure of the world of 
bodily vision, more obedient to all its limits — in a 
word, more technical — than an ordinary drawing-master 
in his class would know how to be. Ruskin teaches 
his students to look at nature with simple eyes, to 
trust sight as the sense of the painter, a sense to be 
kept untampered with, unprompted, and unhampered. 
In a book on Velasquez, published in the winter of 
Ruskin's death, by a critic who perhaps would not 
have consented to quote a precept from Ruskin, nearly 
a page is devoted to the record of what the writer had 
been fortunate enough to hear said by a French painter ; 
and this proves to be but a long statement of what 
Ruskin taught in a single phrase when he bade the 
student to seek to recover the innocence of the eye. 
And yet in spite of admirable theory, the frequently 
recurring praises of William Hunt, the water-colour 
painter of fruit, add to the reader's uneasiness. On 
the other hand, the student is taught to perceive the 
greatness of the greatest masters. 

" You may look, with trust in their being always 
right, at Titian, Veronese, Tintoret, Giorgione, John 
Bellini, and Velasquez. You may look with admira- 
tion, admitting, however, question of right and wrong, 
at Van Eyck, Holbein, Perugino, Francia, Angelico, 
Leonardo da Vinci, Correggio, Vandyck, Rembrandt, 
Reynolds, Gainsborough, Turner, and the modern 
pre-Raphaelites." 



'ELEMENTS OF DRAWING.' 1 33 

Michelangiolo, Raphael, and Rubens are great masters, 
but not masters for students ; Murillo, Salvator, Claude, 
Caspar Poussin, Teniers, are dangerous. 

" You may look, however, for examples of evil, with 
safe universality of reprobation, being sure that every- 
thing you see is bad, at Domenichino, the Caracci, 
Bronzino, and the figure pieces of Salvator." 

In this lesson, the teacher disclaims any intention 
of placing his great ones higher or lower than one 
another ; it is a lesson for those who go to the galleries 
to learn to work and not only to learn to judge. Let 
us contrast with this another lesson (this one from 
the appendix) on things to be studied, whereby the 
young artist is directed to read the poets — Scott, Words- 
worth, Keats, Crabbe, Tennyson, the two Brownings, 
Lowell, Longfellow, and Coventry Patmore alone 
amongst the moderns. " Cast Coleridge at once aside, 
as sickly and useless ; and Shelley as shallow and ver- 
bose." Byron is but withheld for a time, with praise 
of his " magnificence." And we have Patmore — the 
poet of spiritual passion and lofty distinction — praised 
for " quiet modern domestic feeling " and a " finished 
piece of writing." And Shelley " verbose " — Adonais 
verbose, and not Endymioii ! All the living poets 
whom Ruskin praised — Browning, Rossetti, and Pat- 
more amongst them — had to endure to be praised side 
by side with Longfellow, and they did not love the 
association. But in all this strange sentence nothing 



134 JOHN RUSKIN. 

is less intelligible than the word which commends to 
the young student — urged in the same breath to restrict 
himself to what is generous, reverend, and peaceful — 
all the writings of Robert Browning. The student 
is warned to refrain from even noble, even pure, satire, 
from coldness, and from a sneer ; and is yet sent to a 
poet who gave his imagination to the invention of 
infernal hate in the Spanish Cloister, and of the ex- 
planations of Mr Sludge and Bishop Blougram, busily, 
indefatigably squalid and ignoble, and delighting in 
derision. This appendix must have been written in 
a perverse mood ; but in the text what exquisite lessons 
of proportion, and of colour ! For instance, " The eye 
should feel white as a space of strange, heavenly pale- 
ness in the midst of the feeling of colours," and " You 
must make the black conspicuous, the black should 
look strange " ; what a sense of the growth of trees, 
of flowers with their delicate inflections of law, their 
vital symmetry and asymmetry, and their progress, their 
relation, from stem to limit of leaf; what a steady — 
nay eternal — vision of movement — " the animal in its 
motion, the tree in its growth, the cloud in its course, 
the mountain in its wearing away " ! And in the lesson 
on colour occurs the humour that might be a woman's 
or a child's, if woman or child could ever be womanly 
or childish enough to conceive it — it is in a fine pas- 
sage on the economy of nature : " Sometimes I have 
really thought her miserliness intolerable ; in a gentian, 
for instance, the way she economises her ultramarine 



'ELEMENTS OF DRAWING.' 1 35 

down in the bell is a little too bad." With Elements of 
Drawifig should be named Elements of Perspective, a 
series of lessons intended to be read in connexion 
with the first three books of Euclid, signs of yet another 
intellect — the mathematical — added to this wonderful 
spirit. The drawings that accompany Elements of 
Drawing are of great beauty. 



136 



CHAPTER XI. 

'THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART' (1S57). 

This little volume holds the substance of two lectures 
given at Manchester. The lecturer exercises here the 
pleasant art of stimulating his hearers by a paradox, and 
of following the phrase of surprise by an irrefutable 
exposition. His theme is the right expenditure of 
public money. He, like the other economists, has to 
find room, in the national dispensations, for expense 
upon the arts, and in some sort the luxuries, of life. 
Christian and ascetic, he has to consent to this use of 
the fruits of the labours of the poor, as the severe but 
not ascetic " Manchester " economist also must needs 
do. Mill, who insists that all unproductive consump- 
tion is so much loss and destruction, evidently arranges 
for, and tolerates, so much loss and destruction in a 
certain cause ; he allows the artist to destroy what he 
consumes. With such permission a purely scientific 
writer has nothing to do. Like a writer on arithmetic 
a writer on political economy proper states these laws, 
those causes, and yonder consequences, and is not 



'THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART.' 1 37 

called upon, as an economist, to approve or disapprove 
of an act that would disregard the purely economic 
results. (I shall have to urge the same point in regard 
to the later work — Unto this Last.) And this is why 
it is irritating to hear men speak of doing such or 
such a thing " in spite of the political economists," or 
"notwithstanding the professors of the dismal science." 
The calculators of a nation's wealth are simply to state 
their calculations ; that done, they might be the first to 
cherish ethical, or political, or human reasons why loss 
and gain should in such or such a case be disregarded ; 
or, on the other hand, they might hold it to be wiser to 
disregard the results in loss and gain as little as possible. 
But in either case they would cease for the lime to speak 
purely as economists or calculators. Ruskin, needless 
to say, unites the two functions, as indeed almost all 
other writers have done. He thinks precisely, and 
having " done the sum," he passes to the other 
function, and does the ethical work for which his 
calculation has given him material. In these two 
lectures he plans some order in that strictly unproduc- 
tive expenditure without which civilisation could hardly 
endure. The theme of this book is righteous spending, 
while the theme of Ti/ue and Tide is chiefly righteous 
sparing ; and he has much to say here of the honour 
and the power of riches and the disgrace (let us say 
the disgrazia in the Italian sense) of poverty, while in 
Fors C/avigera he gives a solemn personal assurance 
— solemn and personal even for him — that for the rich 



138 JOHN RUSKIN. 

man there is no safety unless he shall "piously and 
prudently" dispose himself to become poor. But the 
poverty he deplores is manifestly the ignorant and for- 
saken poverty that no man ought to endure ; the 
poverty for the love whereof a man of heart despoils 
himself is the poverty of simplicity ; and even the 
poverty of the simple is to be sought chiefly in order 
that there should be none, or less, of the poverty of the 
forsaken. In this very lecture on the administration 
of wealth for the fostering of art, the nation and the 
man are warned alike that the spending which would be 
lawful in a society where none were starving for lack of 
work ought to be forgone or deferred there where 
children have no bread. 

The nation, says in effect the lecturer on " The 
Political Economy of Art," is as free and as bound, as 
responsible and as dependent in its inter-relation, as a 
household, and a nation is governable like a farm. If 
any one shall say that the similitude is too domestic, the 
reply shall be that it is not domestic enough. 

"The real type of a well-organised nation must be pre- 
sented, not by a farm cultivated by servants who wrought 
for hire, . . . but by a farm in which the master was a 
father, and in which all the servants were sons." 

With a peculiar humour, Ruskin begs his hearers not to 
be alarmed at the menacing word "fraternity." The 
French who used it, he declares (for the reassuring of a 
Manchester audience) to have gone wrong in their 
experiment. But the cause of their error he states 



•the rOLTTICAL ECONOMY OF ART.' 1 39 

without irony. It was that they refused to acknowledge 
that fraternity implied a paternity. The world, never- 
theless, does not utter the word paternal without 
burlesque — "a paternal government" — nor the word 
fraternal without defiance. It does not chance that 
paternity is spoken of threateningly or fraternity with 
irony ; but this might have been the humour of the 
commonwealth, instead of the other. Obviously, what 
Ruskin teaches in the political part of this lecture is the 
necessity of authority and — once the arbitrary tyrannies 
of primitive society are done away, which is early in all 
civilisations — the nullity of the " liberty " that men have 
died for with alacrity age by age. 

Wealth ought not to be acquired by covetousness, 
nor distributed by prodigality, nor hoarded by avarice, 
nor increased by competition, nor destroyed by luxury. 
To none of these forms of egoism should be aban- 
doned the important economy of money. Ruskin 
insists upon the special responsibility of man for that 
talent — not the talent of wit or intellect or influence 
with the bishops, but the talent of money literally. In 
"The Political Economy of Art" the reader should note 
the fine page upon the destruction of wealth, as well as 
of art, that is wrought not by the tooth of time. 

" Fancy what Europe would be now, if the delicate 
statues and temples of the Greeks, — if the broad roads 
and massy walls of the Romans, — if the noble and 
pathetic architecture of the middle ages had not been 
ground to the dust by mere human rage." 



140 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE TWO PATHS' (1859). 

The principal teaching of this volume, ratified by a 
preface in 1878, is summed up thus: — 

"The law which it has been my effort chiefly to 
illustrate is the dependence of all noble design, in any 
kind, on the sculpture or painting of Organic Form. 
This is the vital law : lying at the root of all that I have 
ever tried to teach respecting architecture or any other 
art. It is also the law most generally disallowed." 

It is possible that to this book was due much of the 
impatience and anger spent, the day before yesterday, 
upon Ruskin's art-theory. By the day before yesterday 
I mean the time of a flow that has already been suc- 
ceeded by some ebbing movement, and, in this case, 
the time between the popularising in England of the 
"art for art" of the French, about 1880, and the 
day when the last journalist flagged in the last repeti- 
tion thereof — and it took him nearly twenty years. 
In October 1899 a fugitive writer in a conspicuous 
art-review spoke of "the unutterable bosh written by 



'THE TWO PATHS.' I4I 

Ruskin about art " ; and the inferior clownishness of 
that reviewer is only the latest mimicking of the higher 
clownishness of criticism a little earlier written. 

The teaching of The Two Paths has been thought 
out by its author in the very interior intricacies. It 
is dogmatic in proportion to the difficulty which 
he certainly knows he found in that inner place, but 
which he never explicitly confesses. Two paths there 
are, he teaches, one leading to destruction and the 
other to life. The one is that of the artist who loves 
his own skill and seeks first his pleasure in beauty, and 
the other is that of him who loves nature and studies 
the beauty of her truth and never lets go his grasp 
upon the laws of natural living form. Both artists 
may — nay, must — draw conventionally at times, and at 
times must design the mosaic patterns, or the diaper 
patterns, that ultimately resemble each other, assuredly, 
from whichever path they are approached. It seems 
that Ruskin insists upon a difference, even in this 
ultimate point. And yet the prettiest and most in- 
genious oriental diaper of fret-work (which he de- 
nounces) has a suggestion in natural curve, or even in 
the curve of organic life, as the Lombard ornament 
(which he approves) has a suggestion in natural crystal- 
lisation — that is, in something other than organic form 
properly so-called. A similar difficulty occurs to the 
reader in regard to all "convention," however slight. 

This, however, is a difficulty, as it were, at the end 
of the argument. At its head Ruskin has placed a 



142 JOHN RUSKIN. 

difficulty that meets the reader with a very menace. 
The title of this first lecture is " The Deteriorative 
Powers of Conventional Art over Nations." The 
adjective " conventional " seems to mitigate the predi- 
cate of this lecture ; but there is no such mitigation 
in the text, which declares roundly that from the 
moment when a perfect picture is painted or a perfect 
statue wrought within a State, that State begins to 
derogate. Not only is the word "conventional" 
omitted, but the word " perfect " seems to bar it out. 
Then comes the tremendous contrast with which Ruskin 
commands his readers and compels them to attend 
to what shall follow. Thus it stands : India (then 
lately guilty of the Mutiny and accused of more evil 
than she had committed) is a nation possessed of 
exquisite art, but given over to every infernal passion 
— cruelty and the rest. Scotland is a nation full of 
the dignity of virtue and possessed of no art whatever 
except that of arranging lines of colour at right angles 
in the plaid. Splendid are these pages, with their 
nobility and temperance of diction in the statement 
of what is most certainly a disastrous exaggeration. 
They close with the assertion of a brief and absolute 
opposition : " Out of the peat cottage come faith, 
courage, self-sacrifice, purity, and piety . . . ; out of 
the ivory palace come treachery, cruelty, cowardice, 
idolatry, bestiality." Who, nevertheless, in calmer 
thought dare ratify such a sentence? "Piety" — alas! 
" Purity " — alas, alas ! The judgment on the Hindoo 



'THE TWO PATHS.' I43 

calls for more indignant groans. To pass to the art, 
however : Indian art " never represents a natural fact," 
says Ruskin ; but (putting aside the certain truth that 
it is suggested by natural fact, and that the European 
" conventional " art is no more than suggested by 
natural fact) what becomes of his contention that 
Indian art is therefore a portent of degradation, in 
view of the statement on a previous page that the 
perfect statue and the perfect picture were also, in 
Rome and Venice, portents of degradation ? Surely 
the perfect statue represents a natural fact. And 
at the end of a close and urgent argument, the 
reader asks where, then, is Scotland in all this ? 
The Scot of the cottage does not produce the art 
taught by organic form which is so nobly described as 
righteous — he produces no art ; or stay, he produces 
the plaid just mentioned, which is much, much less 
organic than anything in the whole range of Indian 
design. The curve of an Indian shawl-pattern has a 
natural inspiration ; what life — let alone the noble 
animal and human life which Ruskin declares to be 
the highest inspiration of art — but what life, however 
humble, what life of any degree of humbleness, is 
represented, much less imitated, by the plaid ? To 
despise life is, Ruskin teaches, the first and ultimate 
sin. Well, then, asks his reader, are they to be held 
innocent of that sin who, having before their eyes 
the living proportion of common plant-growth, and 
the form of rock, less vital yet erect in all the gravity 



144 JOHN RUSKIN. 

of natural law, yet turned their eyes away and ruled 
the lines of their tartan ; who, having in sight the 
soft gloomy purple of their heather and the soft brown 
of their streams, chose to put that yellow line between 
that blue and that red — the hardest colours of all 
men's invention ? I want such a phrase as Ruskin 
alone could give me to denounce the hatred of nature 
and the contempt of life which the plaid could be 
made to prove. And see what significance he attaches 
to the mere straying from nature in the Hindoo ! 
" He draws no plant, but only a spiral." But the 
Scot loved the plant not enough to draw even a spiral ; 
he ruled straight lines. 

If I have treated this book with controversy, it was 
impossible to do otherwise. But out of its treasures 
of wisdom take the page in praise of Titian which ends 
with the passage: "Nobody cares much at heart 
about Titian ; only there is a strange undercurrent of 
everlasting murmur about his name, which means the 
deep consent of all great men that he is greater than 
they," and so on to the end. For wit take this, from 
the important section of the lecture on " Modern Manu- 
facture and Design," that partly condemns the usual 
teaching of symmetry : — 

" If you learn to draw a leaf well, you are taught . . . 
to turn it the other way, opposite to itself; and the 
two leaves set opposite ways are called 'a design.' . . . 
But if once you learn to draw the human figure, you 
will find that knocking two men's heads together does 
not necessarily constitute a good design." 



'THE TWO PATHS.' I45 

The incident (in the same lecture) of the sporting 
handkerchief is full of signs of charming wit. The 
reader must be referred to the illustration, but let him 
be assured that Ruskin had the best of it in his con- 
troversy with his friend. His friend proved to him 
that series, symmetry, and contrast were the material 
of design, but used them so cleverly that Ruskin could 
show him by his own work how such use could not 
be taught, measured, or ruled ; and, moreover, used 
them with so little beauty that Ruskin was able to 
reply to him that not mere symmetry, but lovely sym- 
metry, was proper to art. For felicity of word read 
what follows : — 

" Outside the town I came upon an old English 
cottage, or mansion, I hardly know which to call it, 
set close under the hill, and beside the river, . , . with 
mullioned windows and a low arched porch ; round 
which, in the little triangular garden, one can imagine 
the family as they used to sit in old summer times, 
the ripple of the river heard faintly through the sweet- 
briar hedge, and the sheep on the far-off wolds shining 
in the evening sunlight. There, uninhabited for many 
and many a year, it had been left in unregarded havoc 
of ruin ; the garden-gate still swung loose to its latch ; 
the garden, blighted utterly into a field of ashes, not 
even a weed taking root there ; the roof torn, . . . the 
shutters hanging about the windows in rags of rotten 
weed ; before its gate, the stream which had gladdened 
it now soaking slowly by, black as ebony, and thick 
with curdling scum ; the bank above it trodden into 
unctuous, sooty slime ; far in front of it, between it 
and the old hills, the furnaces of the city foaming forth 
perpetual plague of sulphurous darkness; the volumes 



146 JOHN RUSKIN. 

of their storm clouds coiling low over a waste of grass- 
less fields." 

That is the circumstance of the designer at Rochdale ; 
and in such conditions fine design is impossible. This, 
on the other hand, is the circumstance of the great 
designer at Pisa : — 

" On each side of a bright river he saw rise a line 
of brighter palaces, arched and pillared, and inlaid with 
deep red porphyry, and with serpentine ; along the 
quays, before their gates, were riding troops of knights, 
noble in face and form, dazzling in crest and shield ; 
horse and man one labyrinth of quaint colour and 
gleaming light — the purple, and silver, and scarlet 
fringes flowing over the strong limbs and clashing 
mail like sea-waves over rocks at sunset. Opening 
on each side from the river were gardens, courts, and 
cloisters ; long successions of white pillars among 
wreaths of vine ; leaping of fountains through buds 
of pomegranate and orange ; and still along the garden- 
paths, and under and through the crimson of the 
pomegranate shadows, moving slowly, groups of the 
fairest women that Italy ever saw — fairest, because 
purest and thoughtfullest ; trained in all high knowledge, 
as in all courteous art — in dance, in song, in sweet 
wit, in lofty learning, in loftier courage, in loftiest love 
— able alike to cheer, to enchant or save, the souls 
of men. Above all this scenery of perfect human life 
rose dome and bell-tower, burning with white alabaster 
and gold ; beyond dome and bell-tower the slopes of 
mighty hills, hoary with olive ; far in the north, above 
a purple sea of peaks of solemn Apennine, the clear, 
sharp-cloven Carrara mountains sent up their steadfast 
flowers of marble summit into amber sky; the great 
sea itself, scorching with expanse of light, stretching 



'the two paths.' 



147 



from their feet to the Gorgonian Isles ; and over all 
these, ever present, near or far — seen through the leaves 
of vine, or imaged with all its march of clouds in the 
Arno's stream, or set with its depth of blue close against 
the golden hair and burning cheek of lady or knight — 
that untroubled and sacred sky, which was to all men, 
in those days of innocent faith indeed the unquestioned 
abode of spirits, as the earth was of men, ... a heaven 
in which every cloud that passed was literally the 
chariot of an angel, and every ray of its Evening and 
Morning streamed from the throne of God. 



Over-rich, even for its purpose, is a phrase now and 
then ; but that sentence, " close against the golden 
hair and burning cheek . . . the untroubled and 
sacred sky," is purely beautiful. As to the signifi- 
cance of this contrast (for controversy must have it 
again), how are we to take it? Here is Rochdale 
declared unable to design beautifully because of its 
internal and surrounding hideousness ; India able to 
design beautifully, with vice, in the midst of beauty ; 
Pisa able to design beautifully in the midst of beauty, 
with virtue, according to this golden picture ; Scot- 
land unable to design beautifully, with virtue, in the 
midst of beauty. What is the lesson, finally? And 
besides this general doubt as to what these several 
things have to prove to us, there is also a local 
question. I never stand under that untroubled and 
sacred sky but with a remembrance of a tower, long 
fallen, that filled a place in the sunny blue aloft. 
Many a space of the earth has been a site of the 



148 JOHN RUSKIN. 

suffering of man ; but here is a space of the very sky 
that has been a site of human wrongs intolerable. 
Above, in that delicate air, was the upper chamber 
of the Tower of Famine ; high in that now vacant 
and serene space sounded the voice of Ugolino and 
his sons. Earth has everywhere her graves ; but no 
other sky than the Pisan sky holds such a place as 
this. 

The world — nature — is full of unanswerable ques- 
tions. It was a courageous enterprise to answer one 
of them in this book — a great enterprise, a great 
defeat. 

To small minds, and to the vulgar, the desire to 
reply to those perpetual questions is a matter of daily 
habit. They have no doubt as to two paths, or as 
to the destination of each, or the cause of its inclin- 
ing. But here, for once, is a great mind condemning 
itself to the disaster of judgment and decision, in its 
divine good faith. It is hardly credible that the in- 
tellectual martyrdom of the enterprise of writing The 
Tivo Paths should have been hailed with the laughter 
of the untroubled. So, nevertheless, it has been. 

Tragedy is not, says Hegel, in the conflict of right 
with wrong, but in the conflict of right with right. 
Ruskin was nobly reluctant to confess such a strife, 
or to be the spectator of such a battle. Hence he 
must declare two paths. But his own labour of the 
mind, his book, is, in the sense of Hegel, tragic. 
For a far better quality of splendid English than 



'THE TWO TATirS.' I49 

the descriptive passage above quoted, I would cite 
this from the lecture that urges upon architects their 
great vocation as sculptors : — 

" Is there anything within range of sight, or concep- 
tion, which may not be of use to yoti ? . . . Whatever 
may be conceived of Divine, or beheld of Human, may 
be dared or adopted by you ; throughout the kingdom 
of animal life, no creature is so vast, or so minute, that 
you cannot deal with it, or bring it into service ; the 
lion and the crocodile will couch about your shafts ; the 
moth and bee will sun themselves upon your flowers ; 
for you, the fawn will leap ; for you, the snail will be 
slow ; for you, the dove smooth her bosom, and the 
hawk spread her wings towards the south. All the 
wide world of vegetation blooms and bends for you ; 
the leaves tremble that you may bid them be still under 
the marble snow; the thorn and the thistle, which the 
earth casts forth as evil, are to you the kindliest ser- 
vants ; no dying petal, nor drooping tendril, is so feeble 
as to have no help for you ; no robed pride of blossom 
so kingly, but it will lay aside its purple to receive at 
your hands its pale immortality." 

Again, Ruskin compares the interest of the geologist, 
of the naturalist, with that of the sculptor, in the things 
they study. " Yon must get the storm-spirit into your 
eagles, and the lordliness into your lions." And again 
he shows the forms of lifeless things — the all but in- 
visible shells that shall lend their shapes to the starred 
traceries of a cathedral roof, the torn cable that can 
twine into a perfect moulding : " You who can crown 
the mountain with its fortress, and the city with its 
towers, are thus able also to give beauty to ashes 



I50 JOHN RUSKIN. 

and worthiness to dust." He presses the example of 
the ancient architects : did they employ a subordinate 
workman as sculptor, ordering of him " bishops at so 
much a mitre, and cripples at so much a crutch ? " 
Was the procession on the portal of Amiens wrought 
so ? 

Amongst the many sentences that in the course of 
all Ruskin's books correct his teaching that nothing 
in nature should be rejected are these : " A looking- 
glass does not design — it receives and communicates 
indiscriminately . . . ; a painter designs when he 
chooses some things, refuses others, and arranges 
all." And " Design, properly so called, is human 
invention, consulting human capacity " (a most ad- 
mirable definition). 

" Out of the infinite heap of things around us in 
the world, it chooses a certain number which it can 
thoroughly grasp, and presents this group to the spec- 
tator in the form best calculated to enable him to 
grasp it also, and to grasp it with delight." 

Japanese art was unconsidered at the time of the 
writing of these lectures. One may wonder how would 
the art, the people, their gentleness, their vices, their 
monstrous burlesque of human form, the distortion, 
the familiarity, the jeer, the mockery, the malice, the 
delicate and intent study of natural fact in plants and 
in birds, the vitality, and especially the love of in- 
nocent life, — how would the men and their art show 
under the intricate tests of The Two Paths ? Where 



'the two paths.' 151 

would Japan stand in that entanglement of India, 
Scotland, Rochdale, and Pisa? 

The last lecture is on " The Work of Iron in Nature, 
Art, and Policy." The history of the colour of iron 
in the landscape is brilliant writing. The warning 
against the foolish use of the word " freedom," and 
against the foolish enthusiasm for the vague idea, 
repeats what Ruskin has said often : " No human 
being, however great or powerful, was ever so free as a 
fish. There is always something that he must, or must 
not, do." 

" In these and all matters you never can reason finally 
from the abstraction, for both liberty and restraint are 
good when they are nobly chosen, . . . but of the two 
. . . it is restraint which characterises the higher 
creature, and betters the lower creature ; and, from the 
ministering of the archangel to the labour of the insect, 
— from the poising of the planets to the gravitation of 
a grain of dust, — the power and glory of all creatures, 
and all matter, consist in their obedience, not in their 
freedom." 



152 



CHAPTER XIII. 

'UNTO THIS LAST' (i860). 

" I REST satisfied with the work, though with nothing 
else that I have done," says John Ruskin in the preface 
to the first issue after the pubUcation had been stopped 
in the Cornhill Magazine ; and in 1888 he said that he 
would be content that all the rest of his books should 
be destroyed rather than this. The book was to give in 
plain English — "it has often been incidentally given in 
good Greek by Plato and Xenophon, and good Latin 
by Cicero and Horace " — a logical definition of wealth. 
The first paper, "The Roots of Honour," treats of the 
wages of labour, and at the outset relieves the reader of 
the usual burden of deciding whether the interests of 
employer and labourer are alike or opposed. According 
to circumstances they may be either. But it is not to 
the chance of the harmony of interests, nor to the 
possible equity of opposition of interests — not to any 
chance whatever — that Ruskin would entrust the rate of 
wages. Unlike other writers on economy at that day, he 
thinks it possible that the rate of wages in industry and 



'UNTO THIS LAST.' 153 

agriculture should be fixed by legislation, and fixed irre- 
spectively of the demand for labour. Vv^hy has the pos- 
sibility so long been denied, in face of the fact that for 
all important and some unimportant labour, wages are 
so regulated — wages of the prime minister, the bishop, 
the general, the cabman, the lawyer, the physician ? 
The difficulty as to good and bad work Ruskin decides 
thus — the good labourer would be employed and the 
bad would not ; but all employed should have the same 
wages. This, moreover, is done in the cases of the pro- 
fessions already named. A bad workman should not 
be permitted to offer his work at half- price, to the 
probable injury of the good ; it is his freedom to do 
so, and not regulation, that is artificial and unnatural. 
Education would continuously lessen the number of 
bad workmen. The second aim of true poUtical 
economy, and a difficult one, is to maintain employment 
steadily despite the "sudden and extensive inequalities 
of demand." But this difficulty, though great, would 
not be so great if the rushes and relaxations, overwork 
and idleness alternately, that come of unequal wages, 
were at an end. There would be a calming-down, and 
employment would become more equal. Furthermore, 
the labourer might be taught to live and work more 
steadily, and therefore more evenly, by the counsel of a 
good employer. And the good employer would be a 
merchant (for example) who should accept his own 
function in the spirit of the lawyer, soldier, or pastor — 
should provide by commerce for the nation, as those 



154 JOHN RUSKIN. 

administer law, defend, or teach, not seeking profit in 
the first place, but rendering in the first place the 
definite service of providing. 

The second paper, "The Veins of Wealth," draws the 
distinction between mercantile economy (as it actually 
is) and true political economy, the first being that rule 
of riches which implies poverty — that is, relative riches, 
the riches of individuals or classes ; whereas political 
economy is the order of riches of the nation, in 
harmony, not in internal contrasts. The art of be- 
coming rich in the mercantile sense is the art of keep- 
ing others poor. Without their poverty, obviously, the 
successful man would have neither servants nor hus- 
bandmen at his disposal. " The establishment of the 
mercantile wealth which consists in a claim upon labour 
signifies a political diminution of the real wealth which 
consists in substantial possessions." That is, the man 
who has become poor, and thus indebted in labour to 
the rich, has been unprofitable to the State. If the 
rich withdraws into idleness, he too becomes unprofit- 
able to the State. The wealth of individuals may be 
gathered in masses, but whether for good or evil no one 
can tell by the mere fact of its existence. It tends to 
gather unequally ; the obvious inequalities of health, 
character, and ability will have it so. But the sight of 
a class enriched ought not to beguile a student of 
economy to think he sees a nation rich. Nor must — 
so John Ruskin teaches — the inequality be left to the 
exaggerations of the unregulated action of forces. The 



'UNTO THIS LAST.' I 55 

economists of iS6o would have it that the course of 
demand and supply cannot be controlled by human 
laws. 

"Precisely in the same sense . . . the waters of the 
world go where they are required. Where the land 
falls the water flows. . . . But the disposition and 
administration . . . can be altered by human fore- 
thought." 

Ruskin then labours to find a rate of wages so just 
that legislation may approve and enforce it. 

"The abstract idea of just or due wages ... is that 
they will consist in a sum of money which will at any 
time procure for [the labourer] at least as much labour 
as he has given. . . . And this equity . . . of payment 
is, observe, wholly independent of any reference to the 
number of men who are willing to do the work." 

The smith who gives his skill and a quarter of an 
hour of his life to forging a horse-shoe has a right to a 
quarter of an hour of equal life and skill, at least, in 
payment, when he needs it. Then comes the difficulty 
of translating this into the kinds of payment the smith 
will actually desire. But Ruskin believes that the dis- 
covery of the right representation of exchange is no 
more difficult than that of the " maxima and minima 
of the vulgar economist " ; the cheapest market in which 
the vulgar economists recommend a man to buy and the 
dearest in which they advise him to sell have to be 
groped for, surely, by hard measures. (How right 
Ruskin is when he says that commercial riches im- 



156 JOHN RUSKIN. 

plies poverty is proved by this once respected maxim. 
The vaunted wealth was not and never could be 
" political " ; for there was necessarily a man selling 
in the cheapest market and buying in the dearest at 
every "operation" of the "principle" — the principle! 
— "Buy in the cheapest," &c.) In brief, a just man 
approaches the just price, as an unjust approaches his 
" cheapest " and " dearest " markets. Nay, the just 
man comes easily nearer to the object of his search ; 
or it would be better to say that there is something 
for him to come at, whereas the commercial economist 
touches ground nowhere. 

" It is easier to determine scientifically what a man 
ought to have for his work than what his necessities will 
compel him to take for it. His necessities can only 
be ascertained by empirical, but his due by analytical, 
investigation." 

Neither the just nor the unjust hirer employs two men 
where only one man is needed. But in the just case 
the hired labourer may be able to hire, for his own 
necessities, another workman by the purchase of what 
he needs ; and the influence of this ability passes on 
through all the kinds and grades of labour. Ruskin's 
system would tend to send wealth flowing. It was, 
needless to say, accused of socialism, to which he 
answers, not very profoundly but profoundly enough 
for the purpose : " Whether socialism has made more 
progress among the army and navy (where payment is 
made on my principles) or among the manufacturing 



'UNTO THIS LAST.' 15/ 

operatives (who are paid on my opponents' principles) 
I leave it to those opponents to ascertain." He re- 
cognises as no other has done "the impossibility of 
equality." He had said in Modern Painters, " Govern- 
ment and Co-operation are . . . the Laws of Life; 
Anarchy and Competition the Laws of Death." A 
modern reader may wonder that Ruskin should, in 
replying to a charge of socialism, defend himself by 
the strange means of a denunciation of anarchy. 
Anarchy and Socialism are the two poles of political 
principle, as we know now that the words are better 
defined ; yet even to-day the two opposites are con- 
fused in daily speech. The truth is that Ruskin's 
system is highly socialistic because it is opposed to 
anarchy and to the licence of irresponsible forces, 
such as competition. But his meaning is not at all 
confused, although in this one instance his diction 
is so. 

To this essay there are two important notes, — one 
announcing Ruskin as a complete Free-trader, despite 
his perception of the false grounds on which the 
public of that day believed in Free trade ; and another 
suggesting that human passion might enter into 
the calculations of science as justly as the " mere 
thought " to the importance whereof Mill confessed 
that he could set no limit, " even in a purely produc- 
tive and material point of view." Mill even assigns 
a certain action to " feelings," but only to those 
" of a disagreeable kind," as discouragements of 



158 JOHN RUSKIN. 

labour. Ruskin would permit feelings "of an agree- 
able kind " to have their turn. 

The fourth and last essay, "Ad Valorem," deals with 
the search, above-indicated, of " the equivalent " — the 
payment that would represent, in the hands of the 
labourer, his right to the labour of another. Ruskin, 
in this research, defines Value, Wealth, Price, and 
Produce. I confess I do not think him to be fair 
either to Mill or to his own argument when he withers 
that writer for his saying that political economy has 
nothing to do with "the estimate of the moralist." 
Mill might justly say this of a science, and yet be 
wiUing that the science should be overruled. The 
economist's business is to demonstrate the laws of 
wealth and their working, and if this were done 
scientifically Ruskin would have no ground of op- 
position. But, on the other hand, he has legitimate 
ground in his contention that Mill is unscientific, 
because it is unscientific to make no calculation of 
human feeling except feeling " of a disagreeable kind." 
Into that contention, however, I do not see that moral 
indignation should enter, albeit intellectual irritation 
may. It is not Ruskin's anger that replies pat to 
Mill's error, but Ruskin's detection, declared in this 
sentence : " The only conclusions of his which I have 
to dispute are those which follow from his premises." 
For he found that Mill covertly introduced the " moral 
estimate" he professed to exclude. It is much to the 
purpose also to expose Mill's definition : " Wealth con- 



'UNTO THIS LAST.' 1 59 

sists of all useful and agreeable objects which possess 
exchangeable value." Usefulness cannot — agreeable- 
ness certainly cannot — be separated from human passion. 
"Therefore," Ruskin says, "political economy, being 
a science of wealth, must be a science respecting human 
capacities and dispositions." A " definition " of Ricardo's 
he shows to be a strange misfit indeed ; and a plain 
reader wishes Cobbett were there to trip, entangle, and 
fell Ricardo in his abominable pronouns : " Utility is 
not the measure of exchangeable value, though it is 
absolutely essential to it." In making his own defini- 
tion of value Ruskin does admirable work in words. 
He reminds us of the nominative of valorem and of 
its reference to health and, in the original sense, to 
virtue. 

" A truly valuable thing is that which leads to life. 
... In proportion as it does not lead to life, or as its 
strength is broken, it is less valuable ; in proportion as 
it leads away from life, it is invaluable." 

This value is independent of opinion, and of quan- 
tity. Here we get back, as in every one of Ruskin's 
books, to that absolute good that Carlyle warned 
us not to doubt at our peril. Within all Ruskin's 
science, all his art, all his sight, and all his thought 
stands this: — 

" The real science of political economy, which has 
yet to be distinguished from the bastard science, as 
medicine from witchcraft, ... is that which teaches 



l6o JOHN RUSKIN. 

nations to desire and labour for the things that lead to 
life." 

It is to teach them to destroy things that lead to 
destruction, and to forsake indifferent things that do 
negative evil. Ruskin then defines " wealth " or 
" having," adding to Mill's definition : " To be wealthy 
is to have a large stock of useful articles," the not 
unnecessary words, "which we can use," and thus 
bringing in once again the human power and the 
human heart. "Wealth," he says, "instead of depend- 
ing merely on a ' have,' is thus seen to depend on a 
' can.' Gladiator's death, on a ' habet ' ; but soldier's 
victory, and state's salvation, on a '■quo phirinmm 
posset.' " " Wealth ... is the possession of the valu- 
able by the valiant." As to price, he teaches that in 
as much as it is exchange value, it has nothing to 
do with profit. It is only in labour there can be 
profit, or advance. The processes of exchange, in so 
far as they are laborious, may bear profit, as involved 
in the labours of production ; but the pure exchange 
is absolute exchange and nothing more. Acquisition 
there is in mercantile exchange, but the word profit 
should represent increase such as that of the work- 
shop and the field. Profit is of "political," acquisi- 
tion of " mercantile," importance ; acquisition makes 
poor by the same act as it makes rich. The making 
rich is conspicuous, and the making poor is obscure, 
but none the less real because it is obscure, of the 
back-street, and finally of the grave ; nothing is more 



'UNTO THIS LAST.' 



I6l 



obscure in this world. Ruskin holds the science of 
acquisition to be the one science that is "founded 
on nescience, and an art founded on artlessness." 
All other arts and sciences, except this, " have for 
their object the doing away with their opposite 
nescience and artlessness." This alone needs the ex- 
istence of the ignorance and helplessness whereby its 
knowledge and power may work. 

" The general law, then, respecting just or economical 
exchange, is simply this : There must be advantage on 
both sides (or if only advantage on one, at least no 
disadvantage on the other), . . . and just payment for 
his time, intelligence, and labour to any intermediate 
person effecting the transaction. . . . And whatever 
advantage there is on either side, and whatever pay is 
given to the intermediate person, should be thoroughly 
known. All attempt at concealment implies some 
practice of the opposite, or undivine, science, founded 
on nescience." 

What we wish for is to be reckoned with amongst 
our gettings, as well as what we need. We wish for 
romantic things, and ideal; "and the regulation of 
the purse is, in its essence, regulation of the imagination 
and the heart." Phenomena of price are therefore 
extremely complex, but price is to be calculated finally 
in labour, and Ruskin goes on to define the nature 
of that standard. " The price of other things must 
always be counted by the quantity of labour ; not 
the price of labour by the quantity of other things." 
And this is well illustrated by an instance too long 

L 



I62 JOHN RUSKIN. 

to quote. To this section belongs the singularly 
interesting sentence on consumption as the end, crown, 
and perfection of production. Ruskin and Mill agree 
mainly in regard to the impoverishing political effect 
of the consumption of the unproductive classes and 
of the vain or vicious consumption of the productive 
classes ; but pure consumption Mill inclines to treat as 
though there were, at any rate, no good in it, whereas 
Ruskin declares it to be in itself good. I own that 
Mill seems to me on this point more logical ; that 
Ruskin's estimate is rather of the joy and happiness 
whereof consumption is the cost than of consumption 
itself; and that it is scientific to treat consumption 
as loss, necessary loss or unnecessary, but still loss. 
Obviously if men could live for a generation without 
food all granaries might overflow ; and eating gives 
pleasure, but the pleasure does not consist in eating 
as an act of destruction. Ruskin, however, seems to 
speak more indisputably when he declares all wealth 
to be measured by this human capacity of consumption, 
and shows good measures of consumption to be as 
worthy of an economist's study as good measures of 
production. He next opposes Mill's assertion that 
" A demand for commodities is not a demand for 
labour." It is one of the knotty points. Near this 
follows a fine passage on wars of capitalists and on 
the taxing of future generations. 

In a word, the book is part of the perpetual plea 
of righteousness against blind self-interest, and the 



'UNTO THIS LAST.' 1 63 

plea is scientific. It closes with some pages beautiful 
beyond praise, and full of the dignity of confidence 
in unalterable facts. Whilst man lives by bread, by 
the very wheat and the flocks, the sacred necessities 
of his body — ^of his mouth — will be the moderate 
measure of his common and daily wealth. 

" All England may, if it chooses, become one manu- 
facturing town ; and Englishmen, sacrificing themselves 
to the good of general humanity, may live diminished 
lives in the midst of noise, of darkness, and of deadly 
exhalation. But the world cannot become a factory 
or a mine. . . . Neither the avarice nor the rage of 
men will ever feed them. ... So long as men live 
by bread, the far away valleys must laugh as they are 
covered with the gold of God, and the shouts of His 
happy multitudes ring round the winepress and the 
well." 

Then he consoles the mere sentimentalist, who 
might fear that the tilled country, peopled one day 
with its natural inheritors, would lose its beauty. Not 
so, Ruskin says ; let the desert have its own plac^, 
but the soil is " loveliest in habitation. . . . The desire 
of the heart is also the desire of the eyes." In this 
he proves his conversion from the young passion of 
Modern Painters for solitudes and its contempt of 
potato-patches. He ends : — 

" Not greater wealth, but simpler pleasure. . . . 
Waste nothing, and grudge nothing. Care in nowise 
to make more of money, but care to make much of 
it ; remembering always the great, palpable, inevitable 



l64 JOHN RUSKIN. 

fact — that what one person has, another cannot have. 
. . . And if, on due and honest thought over these 
things, it seems that the kind of existence to which 
men are now summoned by every plea of pity and 
claim of right may, for some time at least, not be a 
luxurious one; — consider whether, even supposing it 
guiltless, luxury could be desired by any of us, if we 
saw clearly at our sides the suffering which accompanies 
it in the world. . . . The crudest man living could 
not sit at his feast, unless he sat blindfold. Raise 
the veil boldly; face the light; and if, as yet, the 
light of the eye can only be through tears, and the 
light of the body through sackcloth, go thou forth 
weeping, bearing precious seed." 

How did the world hear this appeal? It replied 
with a laugh. Was, then, the argument of the book 
so hollow that the first comer could refute it? Was 
the feeling of the book so small that the first comer 
might deride it ? John Ruskin was bidden to go back 
to his art -criticism. Thackeray stopped the papers 
in the Cornhill. The unsold copies of the reissue 
remained on the publisher's hands. Munera Fiilveris, 
a more technical work on economy, was equally un- 
acceptable in the pages of Fraser's Magazine. 

And now, after forty years, " the living wage " 
is but another name for Ruskin's fixity of payments. 
The old-age pensions of to-day or to-morrow are of 
his proposal ; so are technical and elementary educa- 
tion by the State ; government workshops ; fair rents ; 
fixity of tenure ; compensation for improvements ; 



'UNTO THIS LAST.' 165 

compulsory powers of allotment; the preservation of 
commons; municipal recognition of trades-union rates 
of wages : all are, or are to be, rehearsals of measures 
suggested by him, in this book or elsewhere, to the 
legislature. Private undertakings have followed him 
no less in the building and regulation of houses for 
the poor. 



1 66 



CHAPTER XIV. 

'SESAME AND LILIES' (1864-1869). 

This also was a work solemnly presented. Ruskin 
took it for the initial volume of the revised series 
of his writings, furnished it with a new preface, and 
added to the two lectures a third, which every atten- 
tive reader must hold to be amongst the most mo- 
mentous of the expressions of his mind. It is not 
surprising, to one who has recognised in the book a 
supreme value, to find that in the later preface its 
author declares it to contain the best of many state- 
ments of his purpose. In the same pages he takes 
occasion to present himself to those whose confidence 
he asks :— 

" Not an unjust person ; not an unkind one ; a lover 
of order, labour, and peace. That, it seems to me, 
is enough to give me right to say all I care to say 
on ethical subjects ; more, I could only tell definitely 
through details of autobiography such as none but pros- 
perous and (in the simple sense of the word) faultless 
lives could justify ; and mine has been neither. Yet if 
any one, skilled in reading the torn manuscripts of the 



'SESAME AND LILIES.' 167 

human soul, cares for more intimate knowledge of me, 
he may have it by knowing with what persons in past 
history I have most sympathy. 

" I will name three. 

" In all that is strongest and deepest in me, that fits 
me for my work, and gives light or shadow to my being, 
I have sympathy with Guido Guinicelli. 

" In my constant natural temper, and thoughts of 
things and people, with Marmontel. 

" In my enforced and accidental temper, and thoughts 
of things and people, with Dean Swift." 

/The first lecture — " Sesame : of Kings' Treasuries " — 
is chiefly a plea for accessible libraries. Its demands 
have been fulfilled in part, and as far as public 
authority had office and function in the matter. But 
in part also the urgent counsel of the lecture has 
been absolutely contemned ; for it represented to the 
hearers that inasmuch as life is very short, " and the 
quiet hours of it few," it is well to waste none of 
them in reading worthless books. Public libraries are 
increasing — not entirely in the sense in which Ruskin 
intended to commend them ; for he wished English- 
men to be rather able to buy good books securely 
than to read them free of costj yet in a very real 
sense treasuries have been stored for the use of the 
" quiet hours " of citizens. But it is evident that 
more of the quiet hours of this short life are wasted 
now in reading worthless books than when the re- 
monstrance was spoken. The private following of 
Ruskin's teaching, however diligent it may have been 
with a few, separate and single, has been as nothing 



l68 JOHN RUSKIN. 

amongst the multitude of units. Corporately in muni- 
cipal action, and obscurely in the practice of two or 
three — not joined together, but scattered out of sight 
— "Sesame" had its share of influence'; but its appeal 
was to the private throng, thousands and millions, 
whose conduct of life is matter of their own mul- 
titudinous but solitary responsibility. And in this 
matter of idle reading, general opinion grows daily 
more relaxed. Ruskin would teach men to read ; 
and from this long instruction, in which not a sen- 
tence is futile, I gather first the rebuke of that 
common appreciation, " How good this is — that's ex- 
actly what I think ! " The right feeling is rather, 
" How strange that is ! I never thought of that 
before, and yet I see it is true ; or if I do not 
now, I hope I shall, some day." This is asking 
perhaps overmuch submission ; and assuredly litera- 
ture is a question, a recognition, a consultation, an 
evocation to the reader's spirit. // poeta vii disse : 
Che pensel And what Virgil asked of his student, 
Dante, every poet asks of a young man. [But Ruskin 
says, " Be sure that you go to the author to get at 
his meaning, not to find yours " ; and that doubtless 
is the first step. Next the reader is bidden to look 
intently at words and to know their history. " Let 
the accent of words be watched, and closely : let 
their meaning be watched more closely still, and 
fewer will do the work. . . . There are masked 
words droning and skulking about us in Europe just 



'SESAME AND LILIES.' 169 

now." How excellent a phrase ! Ruskin is not of 
those who think English to be a fortunate language 
in that it has words of Greek and Latin derivation 
for august and awful things. He would have us 
transpose what we have so arbitrarily placed — " damn " 
and " condemn " by popular use, for example, and 
" Bible " and " book " by derivation. \ Nevertheless 
there might be much to be said on the other side. 
Quote the French .Scriptures, in words that do journey- 
man's work — nay, worse, commercial work — in daily 
life, and see the loss. The world acquires and pos- 
sesses a greater number of things — spiritual things — 
as it grows older ; nobler its possessions may not be, 
but they are certainly more numerous ; and England, 
among the nations of the world, is happy in the fact 
that she is able, better than the rest, to multiply 
names for these things by her power of giving to 
one word two forms. Has not Ruskin himself been 
able to think more remotely and more intellectually 
by means of the removed and immaterial Latin word 
of what he calls our " mongrel tongue " ? No imag- 
inative reader, however, and no reader who knows 
anything of Ruskin, will need to be told that when 
he would have us to counterchange " Bible " and 
" book," or any such words, he would add to the 
gravity of this word, not take away from the gravity 
of that. But no reader who knows anything of the 
world will need to be told that in effect the counter- 
change would add nothing to the gravity of one 



I/O JOHN RUSKIN. 

word and would take much from the gravity of the 
other. 

As a lesson in the intent study of words, such as a 
great poet claims from his reader by his own weight 
of special purpose — the single stroke struck with single 
intention — Ruskin takes his hearers through the St 
Peter passage of Lycidas. Every word has full audience, 
and makes an ample discharge of Milton's meaning at 
the assize of this solicitous judge. Nor may we com- 
plain that such separate audience resembles the judg- 
ment of one who would take a lens to look at a picture 
piecemeal. The particular verbal examination is entirely 
right, it answers immediately to a special claim of the 
poet in a special passage ; anon he will relax his de- 
mands, and you the instance of your attention. And 
so does Holbein draw finely, intensely, and niuch^ some 
passage of anatomical articulation, and then pass to 
a larger and slighter drawing of the laxer forms of 
flesh. 

\But the mournful point of this lecture on reading 
is that after all it is a lecture against reading.. The 
lecturer himself must not follow his proper vocation 
— chiefly, he has said elsewhere, the outlining of 
primroses ; because no savages are housed so ill as 
the poor of English towns, or die so lonely ; and no 
man nor woman ought to follow the vocation of art 
or study until the lost were rescued and the names 
of the unknown written in a register open under the 
eyes of a responsible compassion. And even if it 



'SESAME AND LILIES,' 171 

were fit that the arts should engross the human energy 
that is due to the tasks of succour, how should a 
covetous people read aright ? With the love of money 
publicly confessed to be the motive of all action, the 
insanity of avarice is broadcast, and the insane are 
incapable of thought. 

" Happily our disease is, as yet, little worse than 
this incapacity of thought, ... we are still industrious 
to the last hour of the day, though we add the gambler's 
fury to the labourer's patience ; we are still brave to the 
death, though incapable of discerning the true cause for 
battle ; and are still true in affection to our own flesh. 
. . . There is hope for a nation while this can still be 
said of it. As long as it holds its life in its hand, ready 
to give it for its honour (though a foolish honour), for 
its love (though a selfish love), and for its business 
(though a base business), there is hope for it. But hope 
only ; for this instinctive, reckless virtue cannot last." 

On the last page, after the evil of privilege has been 
shown fully, broadly, and with the most impetuous 
will, the problem of privilege is touched where it lies, 
known to all men, awaiting some solution in the future, 
not always to make matter for the last of seventy 
pages. 

" The principal question remains inexorable, — . . . 
which of us, in brief word, is to do the hard and dirty 
work for the rest — and for what pay ? Who is to do 
the pleasant and clean work, and for what pay? . . . 
We live, we gentlemen, on delicatest prey, after the 
manner of weasels ; ... we keep a certain number of 
clowns digging and ditching, and generally stupefied, in 



172 JOHN RUSKIN. 

order that we, being fed gratis, may have all the thinking 
and feeling to ourselves. . . . Yet ... it is perhaps 
better to build a beautiful human creature than a beauti- 
ful dome or steeple, . . . only the beautiful human 
creature will have some duties to do in return." 

It is of these duties that the second lecture, " Of 
Queens' Gardens," treats with singular beauty./ The 
foregoing pages of the book as it stands had assuredly 
cast not only sudden lights upon the evil but black 
shadows upon the good of modern English life. Not 
a word, for instance, of the vast alms, of the private and 
voluntary but corporate service rendered to all kinds of 
distress, of the great socialistic confession of the theory 
of the Poor Law ; not a word of any business that 
is not "base" or of any love that is not "selfish." 
But in " Lilies " the teaching is addressed particularly 
to women of a kind and class that acknowledge con- 
science and are concerned with private duty, though 
they can hardly be charged with an intellectual responsi- 
bility for the national condition. In effect, the examples 
proposed to them by Ruskin are those of heroines who 
have never questioned the privilege — moral, mental, 
bodily — into which they were born. Nor have the 
women addressed inquired into the conditions of their 
own privilege, even though they may vaguely avow 
that some obligations are implied by their unexplained 
"rights." /In addressing women at all Ruskin tells 
us he had recourse to " faith " ; it w^s a faith that 
could boast of no great foundation. 



'SESAME AND LILIES.' 1/3 

" I wrote ' Lilies ' to please one girl ; and were it not 
for what I remember of her, and of few besides, should 
now recast some of the sentences. . , . The fashion of 
the time renders whatever is forward, coarse, or senseless, 
in feminine nature, too palpable to all men." 

The "one girl" was the " Rosie " of /'r<^/(?r/Vrt, whom, 
child and woman, he had loved, and who was dead 
(1875) when he revised the pages written for her. As 
to the audience then left to him, he says that the 
picturesqueness of his earlier writings " had brought 
him acquainted with much of their emptiest en- 
thusiasms " ; and as to the failure of women in relation 
to his own life, " What I might have been so helped " 
[that is, helped by a woman] " I rarely indulge myself 
in the idleness of thinking." 

He proposes examples of heroic nature, and the 
entirely heroic nature of the women of Shakespeare all 
worthy young readers will grant to Ruskin's lovely 
exposition. But they will assuredly boggle at a like 
ascription of honour to the women of Scott. These 
young creatures Scott made virtuous because conven- 
tion required a virtuous maid for the hero to love, and 
made faultless, at a blow, because he could not be at 
the pains to work upon their characters. It is chilling 
to hear their intellect and tenderness praised in the 
noble terms that honour the intellect and tenderness of 
Imogen, Hermione, or Perdita, of a goddess, or of the 
fairy women of romance : "I would take Spenser, and 
show you how all his fairy knights are sometimes 



174 JOHN RUSKIN. 

deceived and sometimes vanquished ; but the soul of 
Una is never darkened, and the spear of Britomart is 
never broken." — "That Athena of the ohve-hehn and 
cloudy shield, to faith in whom you owe, down to this 
date, whatever you hold most precious in art, in litera- 
ture, or in types of national virtue." 
/As for the education of the girl who is in England 
born into the inheritance of the privilege of what is — 
while the disinherited consent — her own place, Ruskin 
counsels what perhaps no one will question. . She is to 
be trained in habits of accurate thought ; she is to 
understand the meaning, the inevitableness, and the 
loveliness of natural laws;/ and to "follow at least some 
one path of scientific attainment as far as to the thresh- 
old of that bitter Valley of Humiliation into which 
only the wisest and bravest of men can descend, owning 
themselves for ever children, gathering pebbles on a 
boundless shore." To the girl herself Ruskin makes a 
passionate appeal. To no one, to no class, has he 
spoken words more urgent, more hardly wrung from 
his profound distress and desire on behalf of mankind. 
The criminal is beyond reach, in the grip of circum- 
stance and of passion ; the political economist is, 
according to Ruskin, teaching his own different lesson ; 
the soldier is under another obedience ; the man is 
indocile. But here, in the nation, is the girl, for a 
score of reasons accessible and profitable. Against her 
sins there is no legislation, against her destructiveness 
no national protest, no public opinion against her 



'SESAME AND LILIES.' 1/5 

cruelty. / In Sesame and Lilies she learns that she must 
not be cruel, and that she must not be idle — that her 
idleness cannot but be cruel ; at her disposal is the 
awful force of the negation of good. He, who does not 
wonder at the death of the miser, at the life of the 
sensualist, at the frenzy of nations, at the crimes of 
kings, does wonder at the lack of mercy in the heart of 
a fortunate woman. iHe would persuade her to make 
garments for the poor and to give alms, not to eat her 
bread in idleness, not to waste it ; to live and care for 
no flowers until she shall have rescued the withering 
flowers of miserable childhood. \ 

" Did you ever hear, not of a Maud but a Madeleine, 
who went down to her garden in the dawn, and found 
One waiting at the gate, whom she supposed to be the 
gardener ? " 

/I'he third and last lecture bound in this volume, 
"The Mystery of Life and its Arts," delivered in Dublin 
in 1868, has near its opening this passage : — 

" I have had what, in many respects, I boldly call 
the misfortune, to set my words somewhat prettily to- 
gether ; not without a foolish vanity in the poor knack 
I had of doing so ; until I was heavily punished for this 
pride, by finding that many people thought of the words 
only, and cared nothing for the meaning." 

A little farther is this : — 

" I spent the ten strongest years of my life (from 
twenty to thirty) in endeavouring to show the excellence 
of the work of the man whom I believed, and rightly 



176 JOHN RUSKIN. 

believed, to be the greatest painter of the schools of 
England since Reynolds. I had then perfect faith in 
the power of every great truth or beauty to prevail 
ultimately. . . . Fortunately or unfortunately, an oppor- 
tunity of perfect trial undeceived me at once and for 
ever." 

Ruskin found that the Turner drawings arranged by 
him for exhibition were the object of absolute public 
neglect. He saw that his ten years had been lost. 

"For that I did not much care; I had, at least, 
learned my own business thoroughly. . . . But what I 
did care for was the — to me frightful — discovery, that 
the most splendid genius in the arts might be permitted 
by Providence to labour and perish uselessly, . . . that 
the glory of it was perishable as well as invisible. That 
was the first mystery of life to me." 

The reader will remember that Turner's pictures were 
not only neglected by men, but also irreparably injured 
and altered by time ; to witness this was to endure the 
chastisement of a hope whereof few men are capable. 
Surely it is no obscure sign of greatness in a soul — that 
it should have hoped so much. Ninety and nine are 
they who need no repentance, having not committed 
the sin of going thus in front of the judgments of 
Heaven — heralds — and have not been called back to 
rebuke as was this one. In what has so often been 
called the dogmatism of Ruskin's work appears this all- 
noble fault. 

Upon the discovery of this mystery crowd all the 
mysteries. Who that has suffered one but has also soon 



'SESAME AND LILIES.' 177 

suffered all? In this great lecture Ruskin confesses 
them one by one, in extremities of soul. And he is 
aghast at the indifference not of the vulgar only, but 
of poets. The seers themselves have paltered with the 
faculty of sight. Milton's history of the fall of the 
angels is unbelievable to himself, told with artifice and 
invention, not a living truth presented to living faith, 
nor told as he must answer it in the last judgment of 
the intellectual conscience. 

" Dante's conception is far more intense, and by him- 
self for the time, not to be escaped from ; it is indeed 
a vision, but a vision only. . . . And the destinies of 
the Christian Church, under their most sacred symbols, 
become literally subordinate to the praise, and are only 
to be understood by the aid, of one dear Florentine 
maiden. ... It seems daily more amazing to me that 
men such as these should dare to . . . fill the open- 
ings of eternity, before which prophets have veiled their 
faces, . . . with idle puppets of their scholastic imagin- 
ation, and melancholy lights of frantic faith in their lost 
mortal love." 

V The indifference of the world as to the infinite ques- 
tion of religion, the indifference of all mankind as to the 
purpose of its little life, of every man as to the effect 
of his little life — in an evil hour these puzzles throng the 
way to the recesses of thought.l As it chanced, with the 
irony of things, Ruskin had been bidden to avoid re- 
ligious questions in Dublin for fear of offending some 
of his hearers. What he had been moved to say, how- 
ever, he thought would offend all if it offended any, and 



178 JOHN RUSKIN. 

not in Dublin only but in the breadth and in the corners 
of the world. |But as his audience expected to hear 
about "art," and not about the mysteries of life, he 
closes the lecture in his old manner, with all the splendid 
confidence of teaching, demonstrating the cause of the 
good fortune of this art and of the disaster of that, put- 
ting away once more what he confessed to be the un- 
answerable, for the exposition of what he held to be 
the answerable, question.'! In a delightful passage (what 
wonder that his hearers wanted to hear it ?) he recurs 
to the contrast of the Lombardic Eve — the barbarous 
carving that had a future, with the Angel (it was an 
Irish angel, by the way), the barbarous design that had 
no possible artistic future and was the end of its own 
futile attempt : these had been described in The Two 
Paths. Here is Ruskin leaving the Mystery for the 
Lesson, i But, strange to say, if ever he has explained 
in vain, registered an inconsequence, committed himself 
to failure, it has been in the generous cause of possible 
rescue — it has been in the Lesson. ) h-r^r-X " • ^' 



179 



CHAPTER XV. 

'THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE' (1866). 

Whether the four lectures published under this title 
chanced to be written at a time of interior weakness 
I know not ; but at least two of them bear such signs 
of flagging life as are not to be found elsewhere. Alike 
in gentleness, in play, in gravity, and in violence — in 
exaggeration itself, which wastes the life of all other 
writers — Ruskin has an incomparable vitality; and it 
is not too much to say that, amongst these many books, 
only in the lecture on "War" is the place of this 
vitality taken by vivacity and excitement ; but the fol- 
lowing lecture, "The Future of England," seems also 
to show signs of the spur. Both lectures were given 
at Woolwich — the one at the Royal Military Academy, 
and the other at the Royal Artillery Institution, with 
four years between. Ruskin had been asked, not once 
or twice, to speak to the young soldier, and had " not 
ventured persistently to refuse " ; and perhaps the 
knowledge that he had a paradox before him caused 
him to make the paradox a sort of impossibility, in 



I So JOHN RUSKIN. 

very despair. Accordingly we have it: "All the pure 
and noble arts of peace are founded on war ; " " No 
great art ever yet arose on earth, but among a nation 
of soldiers ; " " There is no art among a shepherd 
people, if it remains at peace ; " " There is no great 
art possible to a nation but that which is based on 
battle." The reader is almost able to imagine for 
himself how Ruskin opposes these assertions by con- 
demnations of the contentious temper of man who, 
set to dress and to keep his garden, delighted to 
trample it in quarrel. The opposition is violent enough, 
but there is, for once, a lack of passion. Not so when 
war ceases to be directly the theme, and Ruskin ap- 
proaches once more the intricate but more accessible 
question of public economy. 

"You object, Lords of England, to increase, to the 
poor, the wages you give them, because they spend 
them, you say, unadvisedly. Render them, therefore, 
an account of the wages which they give you ; and show 
them, by your example, how to spend theirs to the last 
farthing, advisedly." 

He liad just then heard of working men who spent 
their wages in the brief time of prosperity " by sitting 
two days a-week in the tavern parlour, ladling port 
wine, not out of bowls, but out of buckets " ; and he 
remembered the example set to them at his own first 
college supper. 

The two other lectures are on " Work " and " Traffic," 
and the first was for a Working Men's Institute. The 



'THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.' l8l 

main matter treated is the appointment made by capital 
of the kind and the object of labour. No other opera- 
tion of capital — not even the paying of wages — is so 
momentous as this for the interests of the labouring 
class ; Ruskin accuses the writers on political economy 
of neglecting its importance, but I think that Mill 
has sufficiently marked it, in his own way. The dif- 
ference between Ruskin and the others is probably 
that he sees waste, inutility, and mischief where others, 
beguiled of their clear perceptions by commercial (or 
non-political) economy, were not aware of it : in iron 
railings, for example, set up before a new public- 
house. 

" The front of it was built in so wise manner, that 
a recess of two feet was left below its front windows, 
between them and the street-pavement ; a recess too 
narrow for any possible use (for even if it had been 
occupied by a seat, as in old time it might have been, 
everybody walking along the street would have fallen 
over the legs of the reposing wayfarer). But, by way 
of making this two feet depth of freehold land more 
expressive of the dignity of an establishment for the 
sale of spirituous liquors, it was fenced from the pave- 
ment by an imposing iron railing, having four or five 
spear-heads to the yard of it, and six feet high ; con- 
taining as much iron and iron-work, indeed, as could 
well be put into the space ; and by this stately arrange- 
ment, the little piece of dead ground within . . . 
became a protective receptacle of refuse." 

It was only Ruskin who saw this work to be im- 
poverishing ; and hard by this Croydon railing was 



l82 JOFIN RUSKTN. 

the once sweet stream at Carshalton, full of festering 
refuse that a little natural labour would have cleared. 
Food, fresh air, and pure water brought about by 
labour are so much gain to the nation — a political 
possession — even if the labour spent on them be ill 
paid. 

The lecture on " Traffic " was given in the Bradford 
Town Hall on the eve of the building of a new 
Exchange. " I do not care about this Exchange," 
said the lecturer, " because you don't." 

"You know there are a great many odd styles of 
architecture about ; you don't want to do anything 
ridiculous ; you hear of me, among others, as a respect- 
able architectural man-milliner, and you send for me." 

His hope was to teach his hearers to like something, 
and to build what they could like. "The first and 
last, and closest trial question to any living creature 
is 'What do you like?' . . . Taste is not only a part 
and an index of morality; — it is the 07ily morality," 



183 



CHAPTER XVT. 

'TIME AND TIDE BY WEARE AND TYNE ' (1867). 

The years 1866 and 1867 are famous in the history of 
self-government in England. The agitator and the 
legislator, this party and that, vied amongst themselves 
for a place not in the vanward and the rearward, but 
both in the vanward. Democracy gained ground that 
would not have been yielded to it without the slight 
quibble of altered names. At any rate it was in 1866 
that the two parties began to intersect one another 
at various points, and the intersections took names. 
The great two parties of political history were virtually 
confusible ; somewhat like the little animals, one impla- 
cental and the other placental, and therefore derived 
by descent through ways that lay apart for incalcul- 
able years, yet so like each other in shape, habit, and 
feature that to see them run in the fields you cannot 
tell them apart. Everything then became technically 
political ; politics became a matter not of principle but 
of terminology ; and amid the arbitrary passion about 
words, Ruskin wrote his twenty-five letters to a working 



184 JOHN RUSKIN. 

man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work, to which he 
gave the aforesaid title, and which were intended to 
teach realities. Ruskin himself at times used the 
names of parties, calling himself a Tory or what not. 
But the writer of Time atid Tide is one who warns 
Tory and Radical alike against the illusion of outward 
liberty, and enforces the necessity of inward law first, 
and of outward law secondly, to execute the first. 
Freedom from covetousness, freedom from luxury, pro- 
tection from cruelty — Ruskin would ensure these with 
so much force that standing somewhere between the 
extremity of socialism on the one hand and the 
extremity of anarchism on the other, it would cer- 
tainly be to socialists that he would seem to be 
gathered. Nevertheless, though the socialist might 
quote Time and Tide in favour of licences to marry, 
yet the anarchist might cite the same book against 
the army estimates. 

It is in this little volume, written when men — at 
a time of political revision — were not ashamed to make 
fresh plans (called Utopias in the language of the 
newspaper) for society, that Ruskin has given himself 
the greatest freedom of proposal. That is, he takes, 
for all his sad heart, something of the pleasure of a 
child planning the laws and economies of its own 
island in the Pacific Ocean. There is an ingenious 
interest in the work, and withal a profound conviction 
of the wisdom of what seems so visionary. It is 
needless to say that a proposal to give young men 



'TIME AND TIDE BY WEARE AND TYNE.' 185 

and rosieres a licence to marry when they deserved it 
received from the world the derision that costs nothing 
— not even the pains of reading the book. The book, 
indeed, is full rather of desires than of hopes, and 
its dejection is almost as great as that manifest in the 
most decoratively beautiful of Ruskin's writings — Sesame 
and Lilies. He was not able to acquiesce in the 
sufferings of cities. He was obliged to try to think 
for the foolish and work for the helpless, and to give 
to the disinherited. He was not able, besides, to 
acquiesce in the profanations. 

" The action of the deceiving or devilish power is in 
nothing shown quite so distinctly among us at this day 
— not even in our commercial dishonesties, nor in our 
social cruelties — as in its having been able to take away 
music, as an instrument of education, altogether ; and 
to enlist it wholly in the service of superstition on the 
one hand, and of sensuality on the other." 

It is right that I should quote this unjust passage. 
In 1867 the intellectual and spiritual education of 
thousands of Englishmen by the greatest music in the 
world may not have made great progress ; but even 
at that time Ruskin, if he had looked, might have 
seen multitudes of people studying music neither for 
superstition nor for sensuality ; the citizens at the 
familiar popular concerts were then beginning, with 
the most willing hearts ever brought to the hearing of 
good music, their education at no ignoble hands. The 
page that describes a stage-burlesque of that day (it 



1 86 JOHN RUSKIN. 

would only need to be made more contemptuous for 
this) is written with such strange felicity as Ruskin uses 
when, with much feeling, he writes lightly — 

" The pantomime was AH Balm and the Forty Thieves. 
The forty thieves were girls. The forty thieves had 
forty companions, who were girls. The forty thieves 
and their forty companions were in some way mixed 
up with about four hundred and forty fairies, who were 
girls. There was an Oxford and Cambridge, in which 
the Oxford and Cambridge men were girls. . . . Mingled 
incongruously with these seraphic, and as far as my boy- 
ish experience extends, novel elements of pantomime, 
there were yet some of its old and fast - expiring ele- 
ments. There were, in speciality, two thoroughly good 
pantomime actors, Mr W. H. Payne and Mr Frederick 
Payne. . . . There were two subordinate actors, who 
played, subordinately well, the fore and hind legs of a 
donkey. And there was a little actress, of whom I have 
chiefly to speak, who played exquisitely the little part 
she had to play. The scene in which she appeared was 
. . . the house scene, in which Ali Baba's wife, on 
washing day, is called upon by the butcher, baker, and 
milkman, with unpaid bills ; and in the extremity of her 
distress hears her husband's knock at the door and 
opens it for him to drive in his donkey, laden with 
gold. The children . . . presently share in the rap- 
ture of their father and mother ; and the little lady I 
spoke of — eight or nine years old — dances a pas de 
deux with the donkey. She did it beautifully and 
simply, as a child ought to dance. She was not an 
infant prodigy ; there was no evidence, in the finish 
or strength of her motion, that she had been put to 
continual torture through half her eight or nine years. 
She did nothing more than any child, well taught, but 
painlessly, might easily do. She caricatured no older 



'TIME AND TIDE BY WEARE AND TYNE,' iS/ 

person — attempted no curious or fantastic skill. She 
was dressed decently — she moved decently — she looked 
and behaved innocently — and she danced her joyful 
dance with perfect grace, spirit, sweetness, and self- 
forgetfulness. And through all the vast theatre, full of 
English fathers and mothers and children, there was not 
one hand lifted to give her sign of praise but mine. 
Presently after this came on the forty thieves, who, as 
I told you, were girls ; and, there being no thieving to 
be presently done, and time hanging heavy on their 
hands, arms, and legs, the forty thief-girls proceeded to 
light forty cigars, whereupon the British public give 
them a round of applause. Whereupon I fell a-think- 
ing ; and saw little more of the piece, except as an ugly 
and disturbing dream." 



I recur elsewhere to the saddest page Ruskin ever 
wrote (and perhaps in writing it he did not think how 
some few of his readers would share with him its 
last bitterness) wherein he avers that he has at last 
learnt to be cheerful and to rest in spite of the starv- 
ing and dying of the forlorn, and notwithstanding the 
disregard with which the world had let go by his 
courageous plan of succour. But in 1867 there was 
no such despair, but much distress and desire, in that 
generous heart. He still thought that there were 
many who would defer the arts, the muses, the luxuries, 
the graces of civilisation, the tasks of intellect, and 
the accomplishment of nations, until a rescue had 
been made of the poor. At the time of writing Ti>ne 
and Tide the author had the large desire of saving the 
labouring classes from what Antiquity and the modern 



1 88 JOHN RUSKIN. 

world alike have held to be the misfortune and ser- 
vitude of labour. But he found himself, needless to 
say, with the unvanquished difficulty of the necessity 
of some such servitude. With a laugh he asks the 
professors of Evangelical Christianity — especially the 
ministers — ■ whether they will not purchase their own 
proclaimed eternal reward by taking upon themselves 
the disgrace of the unattractive offices. There seems 
no other way to fill them in the nation as he would 
reconstruct it. He sets about the work of reconstruc- 
tion ingeniously, with wisdom, and like a child. 

" You say that many a boy runs away . . . from 
good positions to go to sea. Of course he does. I 
never said I should have any difficulty in finding sailors, 
but that I shall in finding fishmongers. I am not at 
a loss for gardeners either, but what am I to do for 
greengrocers ? " 

It is chiefly to serve the study of profits, fair and 
unfair, that Tiine and Tide was written ; but amongst 
its many other purposes was that reunion of art and 
handicraft for which Ruskin worked in those days 
alone, and to further which, as also to rebuke luxury, 
he wrote — 

" Labour without joy is base. Labour without sorrow 
is base. Sorrow without labour is base. Joy without 
labour is base." 



1 89 



CHAPTER XVII. 

'THE QUEEN OF THE AH^ ' (1S69). 

RusKiN called this book a study of the Greek myths 
of cloud and storm, but no more than a prefatory 
study — a collection of "desultory memoranda on a 
most noble subject." The myth of Athena, his Queen 
of the Air, he names one of " the great myths," or those 
as to which it is of small importance "what wild hunter 
dreamed, or what childish race first dreaded it," because 
one thing is certain — that a " strong people " lived by 
it. The myth of St George is of the same influential 
and significant kind. But this Queen of the Air is 
queen also of the breathing creatures of earth, queen 
of human breath, and of the moral health and "habitual 
wisdom " of the unaffrighted Grecian heart. Queen 
of the blue air, first of all ; and in the Introduction 
Ruskin appeals once more to a world busied upon the 
defilement of so much of the celestial blue, but at 
that moment greatly interested in Professor TyndalFs 
discovery of the cause of the colour of the sky — re- 
searches for which Ruskin thanks the professor, with 



igO JOHN RUSKIN. 

a gentle apology for any words of his that had seemed 
to fail in respect for the powers of thought of the 
masters of modern physical science. 

"This first day of May, 1869, I am writing where 
my work was begun thirty-five years ago, — within sight 
of the snows of the higher Alps. In that half of the 
permitted life of man, I have seen strange evil brought 
upon every scene that I best loved. . . . The light that 
once flushed those pale summits with its rose at dawn, 
and purple at sunset, is now umbered and faint ; the 
air which once inlaid the clefts of all their golden crags 
with azure is now defiled with languid coils of smoke ; 
. . . the waters that once sank at their feet into crystal- 
line rest are now dimmed and foul." 

Is there any reader inclined to take this for a light 
grief? I protest that it is a heavy one. 

The Athena of the clear heavens was the theme of 
the greatest myth in that central time — about 500 B.C. 
— which held more explicitly and with fuller conscious- 
ness the early religion of the Homeric day. 

" The Homeric poems . . . arc not conceived didac- 
tically, but are didactic in their essence, as all good 
art is. There is an increasing insensibility to this 
character, and even an open denial of it, among us, 
now, which is one of the most curious errors of modern- 
ism, — the peculiar and judicial blindness of an age 
which, having long practised art and poetry for the 
sake of pleasure only, has become incapable of reading 
their language when they were both didactic : and also, 
having been itself accustomed to a professedly didactic 
teaching which yet, for private interests, studiously 
avoids collision with every prevalent vice of its day 
(and especially with avarice), has become equally dead 



'THE QUEEN OF THE AIR.' I9I 

to the intensely ethical conceptions of a race which 
habitually divided all men into two broad classes of 
worthy or worthless ; — good, and good for nothing." 

Ruskin would teach this Greek spirit again to a 
world that had boasted of denying it ; but before the 
formative and decisive spirit of Athena is shown centred 
in the heart and work of men, Ruskin studies it " in 
the heavens " and " in the earth." Athena represents 
" all cloud, and rain, and dew, and darkness, and peace, 
and wrath of heaven." She represents the vegetative 
power of the earth, the motion of sea and of ships, 
the vibration of sound. To her great myth, therefore, 
Ruskin devotes a beautiful page regarding flowers, a 
doubtful page regarding music, and one of great vigour 
regarding the strength that is rather in breath than 
muscle — the young strength in war, wherewith Athena 
filled the breast of Achilles when "She leaped down 
out of heaven like a harpy falcon, shrill-voiced." And 
this follows, on the creature that lives and moves by 
air — the bird : 

" It is little more than a drift of the air brought into 
form by plumes ; the air is in all its quills, it breathes 
through its whole frame and flesh, and glows with air 
in its flying, like a blown flame : it rests upon the air, 
subdues it, surpasses it, outraces it ; — it is the air, con- 
scious of itself, conquering itself, ruling itself." 

The voice of Athena's air is in the bird's throat : 

"As we may imagine the wild form of the cloud 
closed into the perfect form of the bird's wings, so the 
wild voice of the cloud into its ordered and commanded 



192 JOHN KUSKIN. 

voice. . . . Also upon the plumes of the bird are put 
the colours of the air : on these the gold of the cloud, 
that cannot be gathered by covetousness ; the rubies 
of the clouds, that are not the price of Athena, but are 
Athena ; the vermilion of the cloud-bar and the flame 
of the cloud-crest, and the snow of the cloud, and its 
shadow, and the melted blue of the deep wells of the 
sky." 

As the bird has most of the life of air, the serpent 
has least ; and the serpent is one of the dark sayings 
of nature — the invariable living hieroglyph, worth the 
reading. 

" Athena in the Heart " is rather a reading by insight 
of the Greek mind than a tracing of Greek records. 
Ruskin has sought that mind " through the imperfec- 
tion, and alas ! more dimly yet, through the triumphs, 
of formative art." He finds Athena in that early 
creative power — we may name it the mother of art 
that dies in childbirth. 

" It is as vain an attempt to reason out the visionary 
power or guiding influence of Athena in the Greek 
heart, from anything we now read, or possess, of the 
work of Phidias, as it would be for the disciples of 
some new religion to infer the spirit of Christianity from 
Titian's 'Assumption.'" 

But in the days of art, Athena teaches " rightness." 
Every reader of Ruskin knows well what he means by 
this. Rightness is in the nature of the workman — his 
spirit and his style. 

" If stone-work is well put together, it means that 
a thoughtful man planned it, and a careful man cut it. 



'THE QUEEN OF THE AIR.' ^ 193 

... A man may hide himself from you, or misrepre- 
sent himself to you, every other way ; but he cannot 
in his work : there, be sure, you have him to the 
inmost." 

The command of Athena which is the command of 
rightness antecedent to beauty is spoken thus : — 

" ' Be well exercised, and rightly clothed. Clothed, 
and in your right minds ; not insane and in rags, nor 
in soiled fine clothes clutched from each other's 
shoulders. Fight and weave. Then I myself will 
answer for the course of the lance, and the colours of 
the loom.' " 

Ruskin renews, upon this text, his warning to a 
society that sets machines to fight and weave whilst 
men are obliged to stand idle. All vital power, he 
holds, should be employed first, natural mechanical 
force secondly, and artificially produced mechanical 
force only in the third place. " We waste our coal, 
and spoil our humanity, at one and the same time." 
Athena, finally, represents restraint. 

" No one ever gets wiser by doing wrong, nor stronger. 
You will get wiser and stronger only by doing right. 
. . . ' What ! ' a wayward youth might perhaps answer. 
. . . ' Shall I not know the world best by trying the 
wrong of it, and repenting ? ' . . . Your liberty of choice 
has simply destroyed for you so much life and strength, 
never regainable. It is true you now know the habits 
of swine, and the taste of husks : do you think your 
father could not have taught you to know better habits 
and pleasanter tastes ? " 



194 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

'LECTURES ON ART' (1870). 

The first course of Slade Lectures begins with some 
formality and a sense of the novelty and solemnity of 
the lecturer's office. The first of the six goes to the 
beginning of things, and has this sharp phrase on 
education : it is " not the equaliser, but the discoverer, 
of men," and — 

" So far from being instruments for the collection of 
riches, the first lesson of wisdom is to disdain them, and 
of gentleness, to diffuse." 

The technical education proposed by Ruskin is not 
to enable a man here and there to extricate himself 
from a crowd "confessed to be in evil case," but to 
make the case of the crowd more honourable. Art 
may be mingled with their toil, but on this point a 
modest expectation is proposed. Let us not hope, says 
Ruskin in 1870, to excel — not even in the merest 
decoration. 

" No nation ever had, or will have, the power of 
suddenly developing, under the pressure of necessity, 
faculties it had neglected when it was at ease." 



'LECTURES ON ART.' I95 

He closes against his countrymen " the highest fields 
of ideal art," but strangely confounds himself and 
voids his own argument when he closes those fields 
of art for reasons that would avail equally to shut the 
gates of "the highest fields" of ideal literature. He 
finds in the English genius (and so proper thereto that 
the lack, in an Englishman, implies some failure or 
weakness) a pleasure in the grotesque, and a tolerance 
of certain gross forms of evil. Let us grant to Ruskin 
that it is there ; we would go further and grant to him 
that because of it Englishmen cannot be the greatest 
painters, if that concession did not bind us to the 
absurdity that because of it Englishmen cannot be 
the greatest writers. As it is, the theory cannot stand. 
Judged by comparison with Dante, we may be, if 
Ruskin will, a coarse nation ; but in that case a coarse 
nation owns one name certainly greater than Dante's. 
Surely because of his terrible custom of referring the 
human spirit to Dante, and of testing human char- 
acter by the rule of Dante's, does Ruskin commit this 
outrage. 

He offers his countrymen some comfort : if they 
cannot paint the greatest pictures, they can, in the 
persons of Reynolds and Gainsborough, paint portraits 
insuperably good (but in the second lecture he says, 
"The highest that art can do is to set before you the 
true image of the presence of a noble human being"); 
they can love and study landscape by the very fact that 
they are unhappily a city folk, whereas the peasant 



196 JOHN RUSKIN. 

cares little for natural beauty ; and they have a national 
sympathy with animals ; let them improve it and learn 
to draw birds rather than shoot them. And there 
follows a beautiful passage on the inheritance of a 
love of beauty : — 

"In the children of noble races, trained by sur- 
rounding art, and at the same time in the practice 
of great deeds, there is an intense delight in the land- 
scape of their country, as memorial ; a sense not taught 
to them, nor teachable to any others ; but, in them, 
innate ; and the seal and reward of persistence in great 
national life ; — the obedience and the peace of ages 
having extended gradually the glory of the revered 
ancestors also to the ancestral land ; until the Mother- 
hood of the dust, the mystery of the Demeter from 
whose bosom we came, and to whose bosom we return, 
surrounds and inspires, everywhere, the local awe of 
field and fountain." 

The students, discouraged, one must suppose, by the 
inaugural lecture, were instructed, in the second, on 
"The Relation of Art to Religion." 

"The phenomena of imagination . . . are the result 
of the influence of the common and vital, but not, 
therefore, less Divine, spirit, of which some portion is 
given to all living creatures in such manner as may be 
adapted to their rank in creation ', . . . and everything 
which men rightly accomplish is indeed done by Divine 
help, but under a consistent law which is never departed 
from." 

" The Relation of Art to Morals " is the subject of a 
lecture contrasting once more the thought of Antiquity 



'LECTURES ON ART.' I97 

and of the modern world. It seems to the careful 
reader that if Ruskin tests art by morality, he also 
tests morality by art. One page of this lecture puts 
life to the touch with a trial like that of Mr Meredith's 
test, in The Empty Pi/fsc : — 

" Is it accepted of song ? " 

" No art-teaching," says Ruskin in the same lecture, 
"could be of use to you, but would rather be harmful, 
unless it was grafted on something deeper than all art." 
But we have heard him say elsewhere that taste is the 
only morality — that is to say, what a man loves is his 
spiritual life. Whichever of these two answers for the 
other — whether morality for such art as it is able to 
teach, or art for such morality as it is able to teach — 
by neither, nor by both, in those elementary measures, 
are men led many paces on the way they must walk. 
The fact of morality may be established by art, but the 
code of morality whereby we have to control our actions 
and to constrain ourselves has that fact as its starting 
point, and does its effectual work further on. Ruskin, 
however, seems to hold that a working morality is to be 
found in the decisions of art. Leaving these polemics, 
the reader stops with full assent upon this incidental 
judgment of language and literature : — 

" The chief vices of education have arisen from the 
one great fallacy of supposing that noble language is a 
communicable trick of grammar and accent, instead of 
simply the careful expression of 1 ight thought." 



198 JOHN RUSKIN. 

It is certainly not a communicable trick, but neither is 
it a communicable virtue. The following is one of the 
finest of many passages condemning modern conditions : 

" Great obscurity . . . has been brought upon the 
truth ... by the want of integrity and simplicity in 
our modern life. Everything is broken up, . . . be- 
sides being in great part imitative ; so that you not only 
cannot tell what a man is, but sometimes you cannot 
tell whether he is, at all." 

Amongst other things we fail in is anger when it 
is due: Ruskin will not away with our non -vindictive 
justice, which, having convicted a man of a crime worthy 
of death, entirely pardons the criminal, restores him to 
honour and esteem, and then hangs him, — "not as a 
malefactor, but as a scarecrow." 

"That is the theory. And the practice is, that we 
send a child to prison for a month for stealing a handful 
of walnuts, for fear that other children should come to 
steal more of our walnuts. And we do not punish a 
swindler for ruining a thousand families, because we 
think swindling a wholesome excitement to trade." 

Ruskin will have justice to be vindictive and punish- 
ment retributive. 

In "The Relation of Art to Use" we read, "The 
entire vitality of art depends upon its being either full 
of truth or full of use." It is "either to state a true 
thing or to adorn a serviceable one. It must never 
exist alone — never for itself." The very commonplace 
of later, but not latest, opinion is to the contrary. I 
confess that "to state a true thing" is a definition of 



'LECTURES ON ART.' igQ 

purpose against which there may be some rebellion even 
in a mind never subject to the fashion of a now departing 
day. Here, as before, such a mind may appeal, against 
Ruskin's phrase, to the separate art of music. " To 
make a beautiful thing " is not, however, a sufficient 
amendment of that phrase, in as much as " the forma- 
tion of an actually beautiful thing " is involved by Ruskin 
in the act of art. One thing is certain — that it is not 
by way of dishonour to art that he would have art 
subservient, but for the advantage of its essential vitality 
and of its particular skill. Of vitality he is the best 
judge in the world. Of human skill he charges the 
whole world of these three hundred years past with 
taking not too much but too little heed. 

" We have lost our delight in Skill ; in that majesty 
of it . . . which long ago I tried to express, under the 
head of ' ideas of power.' ... All the joy and rever- 
ence we ought to feel in looking at a strong man's work 
have ceased in us. We keep them yet a little in looking 
at a honeycomb or a bird's nest ; we understand that 
these differ, by divinity of skill, from a lump of wax or 
a cluster of sticks." 

It is in the lecture on the relation of art to use, 
moreover, that the reader finds this splendid passage on 
Reynolds : — 

" He rejoices in showing you his skill ; and those of 
you who succeed in learning what painter's work really 
is, will one day rejoice also, even to laughter — that 
highest laughter which springs of pure delight, in watch- 
ing the fortitude and fire of a hand which strikes forth 



200 JOHN RUSKIN. 

its will upon the canvas as easily as the wind strikes it 
on the sea. He rejoices in all abstract beauty and 
rhythm and melody of design." 

But the beauty is to serve by likeness to nature. This 
"likeness" seems to be rather a strain of the idea of 
"use." And in fact to prove this curious contention 
Ruskin is obliged to place portrait at a height, as has 
already been said, that he had seemed to deny it. But 
in the course of this argument is a brilliant page on the 
cause of the dishonour of portraiture in Greek art : — 

"The progressive course of Greek art was in subduing 
monstrous conceptions to natural ones ; it did this by 
general laws ; it reached absolute truth of generic 
human form, and if this ethical force had remained, 
would have advanced into healthy portraiture. But at 
the moment of change the national life ended in 
Greece ; and portraiture, there, meant insult to her 
religion, and flattery to her tyrants. And her skill 
perished, not because she became true in sight, but 
because she became vile in heart." 

But these moralities and portraitures are but obscure 
glories of art in use (as to which the reader may be 
half-convinced, or may hold that they are concerned 
rather with the sense of words than with principles of 
art) compared with the kinds of plain and obvious 
utility to which, in the beginning of this course, as in 
the pamphlet on Pre-Raphaelitism, Ruskin commends 
the services of painters. 

"What we especially need at present for educational 
purposes is to know, not the anatomy of plants, but 



'LECTURES ON ART.' 20I 

their biography — how and where they Hve and die, 
their tempers, benevolences, mahgnities, distresses, and 
virtues. We want them drawn from their youth to their 
age, from bud to fruit. . . . And all this we ought to 
have drawn so accurately that we might at once compare 
any given part of a plant with the same part of any 
other, drawn on the like conditions. Now, is not this 
a work which we may set about here in Oxford, with 
good hope and much pleasure ? " 

Not many thought so, it is said. The professor's classes 
were not well attended. He went on to suggest that 
geology should be served, as well as botany, and urged 
his art students to the study of the cleavage-lines of the 
smallest fragments of rock. To the rescue of topo- 
graphy, and zoology, and history they might go too. 

" The feudal and monastic buildings of Europe, and 
still more the streets of her ancient cities, are vanishing 
like dreams ; and it is difficult to imagine the mingled 
envy and contempt with which future generations will 
look back to us, who still possessed such things, yet 
made no effort to preserve, and scarcely any to delineate 
them ; for, when used as material of landscape by the 
modern artist, they are nearly always superficially or 
flatteringly represented, without zeal enough to pene- 
trate their character, or patience enough to render it 
in modest harmony." 

Ruskin appeals to those professing to love art that 
they would labour to "get the country clean and the 
people lovely," to rescue young creatures from miserable 
toil and deadly shade, to dress them better, to lodge 
them more fitly, to restore the handicrafts to dignity 



202 JOHN RUSKIN. 

and simplicity. But the reform of outward conditions 
must come first, and Ruskin thought that art could 
hardly flourish 

" in any country where the cities are thus built, or 
thus, let me rather say, clotted and coagulated ; spots 
of dreadful mildew spreading by patches and blotches 
over the country they consume." 

It is a repetition of the old contention, made doubtful 
by history as Ruskin himself tells it ; for whenever art 
has begun to decay it has been surrounded, in that 
hour, by fulness of beauty. 

The fourth lecture is a practical lesson on " Line " — 
that outline which is " infinitely subtle ; not even a line, 
but the place of a line, and that, also, made soft by 
texture." The linear arts are the earliest, ahd they 
divide principally into the Greek (line with light) and 
the Gothic (line with colour). Ruskin shows how 
these arts began to cease to depend upon line, and 
learnt to represent masses, and how from them were 
derived 

" two vast mediaeval schools ; one of flat and infin- 
itely varied colour, with exquisite character and senti- 
ment added, . . . but little perception of shadow ; 
the other, of light and shade, with exquisite drawing 
of solid form, and little perception of colour ; sometimes 
as little of sentiment." 

According to Ruskin, the schools of colour enriched 
themselves by adopting from the schools of light and 
shadow " whatever was compatible with their own 



'LECTURES ON ART.' 20.3 

power." The schools of Hght and shadow, on the 
other hand, were too haughty and too weak to learn 
much from the schools of colour. To them is chiefly 
due the decadence of art. " In their fall they dragged 
the schools of colour down with them." Returning 
to the study of line, Ruskin recommends severity in 
drawing as a first aim, rather than the finished studies 
of light and shade practised in some of our classes. 
In the following lecture, on "Light," and in the last, 
on " Colour," he insists further upon the happiness and 
peace of the art of colour, and upon the oppression 
and mortality of the art of chiaroscuro — the art that 
sought light and found darkness also, and loved form 
and found formlessness. 

" The school of light is founded in the Doric worship 
of Apollo and the Ionic worship of Athena, as the 
spirits of life in the light, and of light in the air, opposed 
each to their own contrary deity of death — Apollo to 
the Python, Athena to the Gorgon — Apollo as life in 
light, to the earth spirit of corruption in darkness, 
Athena as life by motion, to the Gorgon spirit of death 
by pause, freezing, or turning to stone ; both of the 
great divinities taking their glory from the evil they 
have conquered ; both of them, when angry, taking to 
men the form of the evil which is their opposite. . . . 
But underlying both these, and far more mysterious, 
dreadful, and yet beautiful, there is the Greek concep- 
tion of spiritual darkness ; of the anger of fate, whether 
foredoomed or avenging." 

Ruskin then takes us through the allegory (not the 
representation) of light in the Greek vase-paintings, and 



204 JOHN RUSKIN. 

closes his history of light with the illumination of the 
work of Turner. To the student it must seem some- 
what fantastic to call the schools of light and shadow 
Greek, for the sake of those allegories of light in Greek 
art — to call, for example, the northern spirit of the 
" Melancholia " and " The Knight and Death " Greek. 
But the student of Ruskin will retain, at any rate, the 
fact that he holds the colour-schools — the Gothic — to 
be the more vital, and the chiaroscuro schools, albeit 
noble in noble masters, to be subject to derogation in 
" licentious and vulgar forms of art " having no parallel 
amongst the colourists. Incidentally I must avow that 
amongst the griefs that a reader of Ruskin has to 
swallow is the contempt of reflected lights that is but 
the outcome of his suspicion and distrust of the schools 
of light and shadow. He bids his classes to make 
little inquiry into reflected lights. 

" Nearly all young students (and too many advanced 
masters) exaggerate them. ... In vulgar chiaroscuro 
the shades are so full of reflection that they look as 
if some one had been walking round the object with 
a candle, and the students, by that help, peering into 
its crannies." 

Ruskin never really loved the landscape of the south. 
In a letter (I think to Miss Siddal) he agrees with her 
that the Mediterranean coast lacks beauty because it 
is too pale. Now, that paleness is due to the reflected 
light in shadow which is the loveliest secret of the 
southern summer, and the surprise of the East ; a secret 



'LECTURES ON ART.' 205 

and a surprise (although it makes all inner places ten- 
derly bright), because the traveller expects, on the con- 
trary, that shadows shall be dark in a bright sun, and 
often expects black shadows so positively that he goes 
further, and describes them. 

Ruskin here, as elsewhere, recommends the student 
not to disregard local colour even in studies of form — 
not to ignore the leopard's spots for the sake of the 
lights or darks that are to aid in showing its anatomy. 
He would have the artist " to consider all nature merely 
as a mosaic of different colours, to be imitated one by 
one, in simplicity." In teaching the practice of the 
colourist painters he insists that "shadows are as much 
colours as lights are"; and that "whoever represents 
them by merely the subdued or darkened tint of the 
light, represents them falsely." In Modern Painters, 
Cuyp and others seemed to be rebuked for the separate 
colour of their shadows ; we must understand false 
separate colour, no doubt ; in any case we may settle 
our difficulties of theory by referring to the Venetian 
practice, which Ruskin pronounces to be right, and 
right in all periods. In 1870 Ruskin had perhaps 
already begun to repent of that Renaissance wherewith 
I venture to charge him in the chapter on St Mark's 
Rest ; and amongst those periods of Venetian "right- 
ness," he was inclining to the tranquil and undazzled 
cheerfulness of the earlier colourists. " None of their 
lights are flashing, . . . they are soft, winning, precious ; 
only, you know, on this condition they cannot have 



206 JOHN RUSKIN. 

sunshine." In our eyes to-day the attaining to sun- 
shine is worth the sacrifice of every lesser " cheerful- 
ness," and of colour itself. And Titian and Tintoretto 
themselves thought so, and Ruskin himself must have 
thought so when he was at the height of his love 
for them, and for Turner. Even in 1870 he writes, 
nobly : — 

" We do not live in the inside of a pearl ; but in 
an atmosphere through which a burning sun shines 
thwartedly, and over which a sorrowful night must far 
prevail. . . . There is mystery in the day as in the 
night." 

Writing thus, he had not yet given his heart to the 
unmysterious allegory of early art. But how strange an 
injustice he could do at this time, and perhaps at all 
times, to that divine creation, " artificial " light, may be 
seen from this. The noble men, he says, of the six- 
teenth century learn their lesson from the schools of 
chiaroscuro nobly : the base men learn it basely. 

"The great men rise from colour to sunlight. The 
base ones fall from colour to candlelight. To-day ' non 
ragioniam di lor.' " 

What, then, about Sir Joshua ? As for the much more 
modern art which studies fire in daylight, and that 
which is dazzled by the flashes of day, they do not exist 
for Ruskin. 

Broadly, he names the Gothic school of colour " the 
school of crystal " (and strangely, too, for the colours of 



'LECTURES ON ART.' 



207 



crystal and of glass are colours through which light 
comes, and are surely unlike the colours of the primitive 
colour-schools) ; and the Greek school of light he names 
"the school of clay: potter's clay, and human, are too 
sorrowfully the same, as far as art is concerned." And 
he tells his classes that they must choose between the 
two, and cannot belong to both. None the less had he 
shown, in many an elaborate lesson, that the great Vene- 
tians had joined form and light to their colour, and that 
they did belong to both. And it is another surprise to 
find him declaring himself " wholly " a Chiaroscurist. 
He had taught, in these same lectures, the colourists to 
be more " vital," and had recommended to the student 
the " mosaic " of the colour of nature ; he had disclaimed 
the chiaroscurists in Modern Painters, and in the later 
studies of Florentine art was to proclaim himself a 
colourist, as it would seem, " wholly." If there is an 
inconsistency, it is perhaps due to the theoretic separa- 
tion of things long joined together ; but the matter is 
full of difficulty to the reader. At any rate, Ruskin 
must needs give his Turner the names of both schools. 
And having a living imagination for the art of action 
(indeed what imagination ever lived so fully as his ?), he 
insists that action was, according to the divisions of this 
book, " Greek," not " Gothic." Yet here again w^hat 
contradictions, when we call to mind the action and 
flight of Gothic architecture, the growing plant in stone, 
the " prickly independence " of the leaf of Gothic 
sculpture, and the repose of Grecian building ! 



208 JOHN RUSKIN. 

The lecturer closes with a sombre encouragement : — 

" You live in an age of base conceit and baser servility 
— an age whose intellect is chiefly formed by pillage, 
and occupied in desecration ; one day mimicking, the 
next destroying, the works of all the noble persons who 
made its intellectual or art life possible to it. . . . In 
the midst of all this you have to become lowly and 
strong." 



209 



CHAPTER XIX. 
'ARATRA PENTELICr (1S72). 

This course of Slade Lectures treats of the Elements of 
Sculpture. At setting forth Ruskin condemns the life- 
less work of cutting and chiselling jewels, in as much 
as true goods are common goods, and these crystals 
are prized chiefly because of their rarity. True sculpture 
he teaches to be the conquest of the ploughshare and 
the chisel over clay ; it is the victory of life ; and the 
true sculptor " sees Pallas," that is, the spirit of life, 
and of wisdom in the choice of life to be honoured by 
art. This is another form of the lesson on " natural 
form." Life purifies design. Here is briefly the indica- 
tion of the essential matter of these lectures : — 

True schools of sculpture are peculiar to nations in 
their youth and in their strong humanity. The Greeks 
found Phoenician and Etruscan art monstrous and made 
them human. The Florentines found Byzantine and 
Norman art monstrous and made them human — both 
the reforming schools being wholly sincere. 

" We, on the contrary, are now . . . absolutely with- 
out sincerity ; absolutely, therefore, without imagination, 



2IO JOHN RUSKIN. 

and without virtue. Our hands are dexterous with the 
vile and deadly dexterity of machines ; our minds filled 
with incoherent fragments of faith, which we cling to 
in cowardice, without believing, and make pictures of, 
in vanity, without loving." 

Then follows a sketch of the Thames Embankment ; 
its gas jets coming out of fishes' tails borrowed from 
a refuse Neapolitan marble, and these ill- cast and 
lacquered to imitate bronze, adorned with a caduceus 
stolen from Mercury, a street - knocker from two or 
three million street doors, the initials of the casting 
firm, and a lion's head copied from the Greek ; while 
the arch of Waterloo Bridge, under which this embank- 
ment passes, is but a " gloomy and hollow heap of 
wedged blocks of blind granite." 

Sculpture touches life essentially, and is forbidden to 
recognise those accidental beauties, such as the growth 
of lichen on a tree, that a painter pauses on. Its 
drapery has caught the life of the body. The con- 
troversy between Florentine and Greek drapery — the 
Florentine having its own beauty rather than the body's 
beauty ■ — is in truth the difference between painting 
and sculpture. In the study of the Greek Ruskin takes 
us through the nine centuries — three archaic, three 
central, and three decadent — whereof the fifth century 
B.C. is symmetrically the middle age and the greatest. 
He insists upon the naturalism of the Greeks, and 
plunges once more into that perpetual question — 
whether art can ever approach too near to nature. 



'ARATRA PENTELICI.' 211 

answering with that emphatic " No ! " to which some 
of his pages hardly seem to assent hterally. Once 
more he reproaches the artists called " ideal," whether 
sculptors or painters, for attempting to mend nature ; 
and to this rebuke many and many an artist's heart must 
have replied that this is but a trap of words, for, at the 
worst, it is not nature the painter tries to mend, but his 
picture. In Modern Painters it had been written : " The 
picture which is taken as a substitute for nature had 
better be burned " ; but are we forbidden to do honour 
to a " substitute " by the name, say, of emissary, ambas- 
sador, or representative ? 

"The true sign," says Ruskin, "of the greatest art is 
to part voluntarily with its greatness," by making the 
eyes of those who look upon it to desire the natural 
fact. And this the Greeks knew. Phalaris says of the 
bull of Perilaus : " It only wanted motion and bellow- 
ing to seem alive ; and as soon as I saw it I cried out. 
It ought to be sent to the god " — to Apollo, that is, 
who would delight in a work worthy to deceive not the 
simple but the wise. The Greek " rules over the arts 
to this day, and will for ever, because he sought not 
first for beauty, not first for passion or for invention, but 
for Rightness." With him was the origin not only of 
all broad, mighty, and calm conception, " but of all that 
is divided, delicate, and tremulous." To him is owing 
the gigantic pillar of Agrigentum and the " last fineness 
of the Pisan Chapel of the Thorn." The beginning of 
Christian chivalry was in his bridling of the white and 



212 JOHN RUSKIN. 

the black horses — the spiritual and animal natures. 
" He became at last Grccculus esuriens, little and hungry, 
and every man's errand boy," but this was in late 
ages, " by his iniquity, and his competition, and his 
love of talking." 

Ruskin gives a Greek lesson on the modesty of art : 
no block for building should be larger than a cart can 
carry, or a cross-beam and a couple of pulleys can lift ; 
a lesson on the modesty of material in sculpture — clay, 
marble, metal having their limitations, which are also 
their particular powers ; an exquisite lesson on the 
subtle laws of low relief; one on art-handicraft and art 
for the multitude. As far as I know, the first — it is not 
quite the only — reference to Japanese art is in these 
lectures, which were illustrated by an admirably vital 
Japanese fish ; but Oriental art was generally repre- 
sented, in Ruskin's mind, by the Indian, which is 
obscure, dateless, and dead. 

Two quotations follow, which need no explicit con- 
nexion here with the rest : — 

" Art is not possible to any sickly person, but involves 
the action and force of a strong man's arm from the 
shoulder." 

And this from the lecture on Imagination : — 

"Remember . . . that it is of the very highest im- 
portance that you should know what you are, and 
determine to be the best that you may be ; but it is 
of no importance whatever, except as it may contribute 
to that end, to know what you have been. Whether 



'ARATRA PENTELICI.' 213 

your Creator shaped you with fingers, or tools, as a 
sculptor would a lump of clay, or gradually raised you 
to mankind through a series of inferior forms, is only of 
moment to you in this respect — that in the one case 
you cannot expect your children to be nobler creatures 
than you are yourselves ; in the other, every act and 
thought of your present life may be hastening the advent 
of a race which will look back to you, their fathers (and 
you ought at least to have attained the dignity of desir- 
ing that it may be so), with incredulous disdain." 

The lectures close with a history of the decline of 
great art in the work of a great man — Michelangiolo — 
and a warning against the " subUmity " that has so 
taken captive the world. In choosing to admire his 
" Last Judgment " rather than Tintoretto's " Paradise," 
men have deliberately chosen, Ruskin tells us, God's 
curse instead of His blessing. 

The Spectator accused Ruskin of attempting, by his 
teaching in this book, to make our rich nation poor, if 
only he could make it artistic. But I need not insist 
again on this — that he held the nation to be poor, 
intolerably poor in its millions, dangerously poor in its 
dependence on the bread of foreign fields. 

Amongst the illustrations is that of the two profiles — 
the "Apollo of Syracuse" and the "Self-Made Man." 
The draughtsman of the latter most admirable head (" so 
vigorously drawn, and with so few touches, that Phidias 
or Turner himself could scarcely have done it better") 
is not named, but could have been no other than 
Keene. 



214 



CHAPTER XX. 

'THE EAGLE'S NEST' (1872). 

This book was the one preferred by Carlyle. One must 
wonder whether the passage on the immorahty of original 
or separate style in art seemed to him stuff o' the con- 
science, and whether he held an author, like a painter, to 
be bound not to produce " something different from the 
work of his neighbours " — in the English language, for 
example. 

The Eagle's Nest (Slade Lectures) is an essay in 
search of that wisdom which is president over science, 
literature, and art — ultimately the divine sophia also 
called charity: "Art is wise only when unselfish in her 
labour ; . . . Science wise only when unselfish in her 
statement." " Art is the shadow or reflection of wise 
science ; and both are peaceful, temperate, and con- 
tent." The eagle and the mole have their natural 
places of knowledge and ignorance, but " man has the 
choice of stooping in science beneath himself and of 
rising above himself"; therefore he has to seek the 
sophia that is beyond, for his inspiration and restraint. 



'THE eagle's nest.' 215 

He needs " imaginative knowledge," and especially 
" knowledge of the feelings of living creatures," know- 
ledge of life. 

" Sophia is the faculty which recognises in all things 
their bearing upon life, in the entire sum of life that we 
know." 

And Sophia is offended by egoism : — 

"In all base schools of art, the craftsman is dependent 
for his bread on originality ; that is to say, on finding 
in himself some fragment of isolated faculty, by which 
his work may be recognised as distinct from that of other 
men. We are ready enough to take delight in our little 
doings, without any such stimulus ; what must be the 
effect of the popular applause which continually suggests 
that the little thing we can separately do is as excellent 
as it is singular ! ... In all great schools of art these 
conditions are exactly reversed. An artist is praised 
in these, not for what is different in him from others ; 
. . . but only for doing most strongly what all arc 
endeavouring ; and for contributing ... to some great 
achievement, to be completed by the unity of multitudes, 
and the sequence of ages." 

Wisdom is outraged, not only in our art but in 
our science, which we have not used, for example, to 
prevent the famines in the East. Ruskin habitually 
accuses modern men of these failures as though they 
were immediate murders. The Middle Ages he loves 
were wont to put men, women, and children to death 
by sword or privation or fire ; he multiplies the thou- 
sands that so died in an Italian town into the thousands 



2l6 JOHN RUSKIN. 

that die by hunger in an Indian province, and with 
these numbers multiplies our guilt. 

"No people, understanding pain, ever inflicted so 
much ; no people, understanding facts, ever acted on 
them so little." 

Mimetic art, says the third lecture, is in epitome in 
Shakespeare's sentence, placed in the mouth of Theseus 
— " the hero," as it chances, " whose shadow, or sem- 
blance in marble, is admittedly the most ideal and 
heroic we possess of man " ; and the sentence is : " The 
best in this kind are but shadows ; and the worst are 
no worse, if imagination amend them." And because 
the works of art are shadows, Ruskin would have us to 
love them and to use them only to enable us " to 
remember and love what they are cast by." To love 
art otherwise is to be the fool who wonders at his own 
shadow. Even Ruskin has spoken no sayings harder 
to bear than these. Wise art is in direct relation to 
wise science, we are told in the same lecture ; they have 
the same subjects ; and art helps science, and helps 
her more and more as the degrees of science rise : that 
is, art gives little help to the science of chemistry, little 
to the science of anatomy (it is Shakespeare that Ruskin 
has taken as the " subject," and he gauges what chemistry 
and anatomy have to tell us of Shakespeare) ; but it 
helps more the science of human sensibility, that science 
which has something to tell of Shakespeare's nerve-power 
and emotion ; and it helps most of all the science of 



'THE eagle's nest.' 21/ 

theology, which tells us of Shakespeare's relation to a 
Being greater than himself. 

The lecture passes to the consideration of the sophia 
that stands above the several sciences : ornithology is 
the subject of the lecturer's present lesson, and nest- 
building gives him the opportunity for his loveliest 
work, wherein we are appropriately made to love the 
nest - building rather than the description. And the 
great artist, Ruskin says, works somewhat like the bird 
— " with the feeling we may attribute to a diligent bull- 
finch — that the thing, whether pretty or ugly, could not 
have been better done," and he is " thankful it is no 
worse." And though this is the feeling of the great, 
could not even ordinary men, asks Ruskin, be so simple 
in their measure that superior beings might be interested 
in their work, as men are in the birds' ? 

" It cannot be imagined that either the back streets 
of our manufacturing towns, or the designs of our 
suburban villas, are things which the angels desire to 
look into ; . . . but we should at least possess as much 
unconscious art as the lower brutes, and build nests 
which shall be, for ourselves, entirely convenient, and 
may perhaps in the eyes of superior beings appear more 
beautiful than to our own." 

It would be easy to reply that the suburban villa with 
its bathrooms is — whatever else it may fail to be — more 
convenient and ingenious than a nest. And as for the 
noise of a town and the noise of birds, compared on a 
following page, Ruskin does not open any door on the 



2l8 JOHN RUSKIN. 

crashing street he loathes, in order to Hsten to the 
Beethoven within the walls. Some sophia originally 
directed the prudence of the common builder; much 
sophia inspired the music. It is music again that 
gravely refuses assent to these lessons of humiliation, 
repeated in the fourth lecture. 

Ruskin anticipates the murmurs of his hearers at 
hearing him rank sciences in degrees whereof chemistry 
holds the lowest and theology the highest ; nevertheless 
he affirms that if theology be science at all, the highest is 
its place ; and that it is a science other sciences vouch. 

" You will find it a practical fact that external tempta- 
tion and inevitable trials of temper have power against 
you which your health and virtue depend on your 
resisting ; that, if not resisted, the evil energy of them 
will pass into your own heart ; . . . and that the 
ordinary and vulgarised phrase ' the Devil, or betraying 
spirit, is in him ' is the most scientifically accurate which 
you can apply to any person so influenced." 

All science, the lecture proceeds, must needs be 
modest, because although the field of fact is immeasur- 
able, not so is the human power of research. Art is 
modest ; Ruskin here commends humble landscape 
and discommends the Matterhorns and Monte Rosas ; 
although elsewhere he laments that good painters are 
too easily content with the odds and ends of landscape, 
and leave noble scenery to the bad ones. Art, accord- 
ing to the present lesson, should be content. The 
promise that we shall know all things is a siren promise, 



'THE eagle's nest.' 219 

as it was to Ulysses. Let us not abandon, for the 
sake of limited knowledge, " the charity that is for itself 
sufificing, and for others serviceable." And for the sake 
of contentment Ruskin allows us to be pleased in the 
little things we can do, " more than in the great things 
done by other people." He forbears here to intimidate 
us with that menacing question of the earlier page of 
these lectures — what will our selfishness grow to if we 
cherish our own achievement ? For we are to confess 
the little we do to be little, and contributory. Art must 
be happy, and therefore content, even in its rudeness 
and ignorance. 

" Ignorance, which is contented and clumsy, will 
produce what is imperfect, but not offensive. But 
ignorance ^/j-contented, and dexterous, learning what 
it cannot understand, and imitating what it cannot 
enjoy, produces the most loathsome forms of manu- 
facture that can disgrace or mislead humanity." 

The finest art of the world has been provincial, limited 
and strengthened by local difficulties, and this is another 
occasion for contentment. 

The sixth lecture is on " The Relation to Art of the 
Science of Light." Ruskin studies the sense of sight 
as what it is — a spiritual phenomenon. The spirituality 
of the senses is manifest to him, as to every thinker. 
Science, at the time of the writing of this lecture, was 
beginning to adopt the view that " sight is purely 
material"; but the "view" was not a view — it was no 
more than a confusion of words. At the same date 



220 JOHN RUSKIN. 

some rhetoric had been spent by a scientific writer on 
the sun : " He rears the whole vegetable world, . . . 
his fleetness is in the lion's foot, he springs in the 
panther, he slides in the snake," &c., which is also but 
a kind of circular work of words. Ruskin's retort is so 
exquisitely written that it must be extracted with little 
shortening : — 

" As I was walking in the woods, and moving very 
quietly, I came suddenly on a small steel-grey serpent, 
lying in the middle of the path ; and it was greatly 
surprised to see me. Serpents, however, always have 
complete command of their feelings, and it looked at 
me for a quarter of a minute without the slightest 
change of posture ; then, with an almost imperceptible 
motion, it began to withdraw itself beneath a cluster of 
leaves. Without in the least hastening its action it 
gradually concealed the whole of its body. I was 
about to raise one of the leaves, when I saw what I 
thought was the glance of another serpent, in the thicket 
at the path side; but it was the same one, which, 
having once withdrawn itself from observation beneath 
the leaves, used its utmost agility to spring into the 
wood ; and with so instantaneous a flash of motion 
that I never saw it leave the covert, and only caught 
the gleam of light as it glided away into the copse. . . . 
I am pleased to hear . . . how necessarily that motion 
proceeds from the sun. But where did its device come 
from ? " 

From the sun too ; and the flight of the dove from the 
sun also ; but the difference of those derivations, whence 
are they ? " Animism " had hardly yet entered into the 
controversy in 1872. How much of a man does a 
serpent see ? asks Ruskin. 



•the eagle's nest.' 221 

" Make me a picture of the appearance of a man, as 
far as you can judge it can take place on the snake's 
retina. . . . How say you of a tiger's eye, or a cat's ? 
... I want to know what the appearance is to an 
eagle, two thousand feet up, of a sparrow in a hedge." 

In the lecture on "The Sciences of Inorganic Form" 
we find chiefly the lesson on drapery which teaches 
finely that drapery " must become organic under the 
artist's hand by his invention " ; and in that following, 
on " Organic Form," the teaching enforced — that art 
has nothing to do with structure, causes, or absolute 
facts, and that therefore " the study of anatomy gen- 
erally, whether of plants, animals, or man, is an im- 
pediment to graphic art." Man has to think of all 
living creatures " with their skins on them and with 
their souls in them ; " he is to know 

" how they are spotted, wrinkled, furred, and feathered ; 
and what the look of them is, in their eyes ; and 
what grasp, or cling, or trot, or pat, in their paws and 
claws." 

Then follow some exquisite pages on the dogs of art, 
from Anacreon's in the Greek vase-painting, onwards. 
Sir Joshua, painting child and dog together in their 
" infinite differences and blessed harmonies," never, 
says Ruskin, thinks of their bones. 

" You might dissect all the dead dogs in the water- 
supply of London without finding out what, as a painter, 
it is here your only business precisely to know — what 
sort of shininess there is at the end of a terrier's nose." 



222 JOHN RUSKIN. 

Yet the breath was hardly gone in which he had taught 
his hearers to study a little piece of broken stone for 
its veining, as, in another volume, we shall find him 
withering Millais for having painted a wild rose with 
a petal too few, and commending Holbein for having 
drawn a skeleton with a rib too many. The student 
should easily understand the difference. In the case of 
the rose the painter had committed a fault against the 
duty of ordinary and innocent sight — a painter's first 
duty, the duty of the daily vision ; not so in the case 
of the skeleton. And almost, though not quite, the 
same difference may be found between geological 
reserves and anatomical secrets. Anatomy, says 
Ruskin, misleads the artist especially in the study 
of the eagle's head, with its projection of the brow, 
hooding the eye — its most eagle-like characteristic, 
which the bone does not suggest and which no dis- 
sector seems to have taken the trouble to notice. But 
the Greek artist, and the Pisan, knew of it. Further- 
more, through anatomy in art the lower class of animals 
are represented well, and the higher, ill. As for the 
study of the nude, Ruskin holds it to be, at any rate, 
a bad thing for our care for beauty in dress and in 
the conditions of actual life ; and he corrects the 
popular idea of Greek power : it was due little to 
admiration of bodily beauty, but much to those 
causes of bodily beauty — "discipline of the senses, 
romantic ideal of honour, respect for justice, and 
belief in God." The lecture ends with "a piece of 



'THE eagle's nest.' 223 

theology . . . — a science much closer to your art 
than anatomy " : 

" ' I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver 
of Life.' Disbelieve that ! and your own being is 
degraded into the state of dust driven by the wind. . . . 
AH Nature, with one voice — with one glory, — is set to 
teach you reverence for the life communicated to you 
from the Father of Spirits : . , . and all the strength, 
and all the arts of men, are measured by, and founded 
upon, their reverence for the passion, and their guardian- 
ship of the purity, of Love. Gentlemen — . . . that 
epithet of 'gentle,' as you well know, indicates the 
intense respect for race and fatherhood — for family 
dignity and chastity — which was visibly the strength 
of Rome, as it had been, more disguisedly, the strength 
of Greece." 

The following lecture — "The Story of the Halcyon" 
— deplores the popular idea of education that leaves 
an Englishman in such a state of heart that when he 
sees a rare bird he kills it ; that is, he has never learnt 
to see it rightly — to see its life. Man should see a 
bird rightly, and a man rightly : — 

" Then the last part of education will be — whatever 
is meant by that beatitude of the pure in heart — seeing 
God rightly." 

In his study of the bird Ruskin proposes the mystery 
of the limiting laws of structure : — 

" It is appointed that vertebrated animals shall have 
no more than four legs, and that, if they require to fly, 
the two legs in front must become wings, it being against 



224 JOHN RUSKTN. 

law that they should have more than these four members 
in ramification from the spine. . . . What strongly 
planted three-legged animals there might have been ! 
what symmetrically radiant five-legged ones ! what vola- 
tile six-legged ones; what circumspect seven-headed 
ones ! Had Darwinism been true, we should long 
ago have split our heads in two with foolish thinking, 
or thrust out, from above our covetous hearts, a hundred 
desirous arms and clutching hands. . . . But the law 
is around us, and within ; unconquerable ; granting, 
up to a certain limit, power over our bodies to cir- 
cumstance and will : beyond that limit, inviolable, 
inscrutable, and, so far as we know, eternal." 

His contempt for "Darwinism" Ruskin explains by the 
kind of Darwinian argument then presented to students. 
He himself had consulted Darwin's account of the con- 
struction of the peacock's feather. None of the existing 
laws of life regulating the local disposition of colour in 
plume-filaments seemed to be known. 

"I am informed only that peacocks have grown to be 
peacocks out of brown pheasants because the young 
feminine brown pheasants like fine feathers. Where- 
upon I say to myself, 'Then either there was a distinct 
species of brown pheasants originally born with a taste 
for fine feathers, and therefore with remarkable eyes in 
their heads, — which would be a much more wonderful 
distinction of species than being born with remarkable 
eyes in their tails, — or else all pheasants would have 
been peacocks by this time.' " 

The reader will do well to read this twice : it is an 
extraordinarily full piece of writing. 

From the lovely fables of Alcyone and Ceyx Ruskin 



'THE eagle's nest.' 225 

quotes — it is wonderfully to the purpose of this book — 
the word of Simonides in his description of the halcyon 
days : " In the wild winter months Zeus gives the 
wisdom of calm." But as for us, — 

"To what sorrowful birds shall we be likened, who 
make the principal object of our lives dispeace and 
unrest, and turn our wives and daughters out of their 
nests to work for themselves ? Nay, strictly speaking, 
we have not even got so much as nests to turn them 
out of." 

On the old subject of the ill building of human nests 
Ruskin has an excellent phrase for the Houses of 
Parliament : — 

"A number of English gentlemen get together to 
talk ; they have no delight whatever in any kind of 
beauty; but they have a vague notion that the appointed 
place for their conversation should be dignified and 
ornamental ; and they build over their combined heads 
the absurdest and emptiest piece of filigree, — and as it 
were eternal foolscap in freestone, — which ever human 
beings disgraced their posterity by." 

While bullfinches " peck a Gothic tracery out of dead 
clematis," the English yeoman thinks it much if he gets 
from his landlord "four dead walls and a drain-pipe." 
He is lodged as " a puppet is dropped into a deal box." 
But two centuries ago, " without steam, without electric- 
ity, almost without books, and altogether without help 
from CasseWs Educator,'' the Swiss shepherd "could 
build himself a chalet, daintily carved, and with 

p 



226 JOHN RUSKIN. 

flourished inscriptions." No man should be satisfied 
with less than a cottage and a garden in pure air, and 
the nests of men should be nests of peace. The word 
is left, very exquisitely, with the halcyons ; for Ruskin 
adds that the making of peace must be in this life — • 

"Not the taking of arms against, but the building of 
nests amidst, its ' sea of troubles.' " 



227 



CHAPTER XXI. 

'ARIADNE FLORENTINA' (1873). 

The six Sladc Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving 
contain some of the severest of all the author's critical 
work — severest not because it shows a fault of Diirer 
or declares a certain destructive influence of Michel- 
angiolo, but severest in its intensity of thought and in 
the closeness of the hold this adventurous and resolute 
mind takes upon some discovered track of thought, 
however difficult, and compels the reader to attempt 
the path. Many have held Ruskin's method of thought 
to have been something less purely experimental than 
this ; and let us grant that he does set out upon an 
untried quest with a " working hypothesis " ; but with- 
out a working hypothesis experiment itself would lack 
impetus and direction, and would sometimes hesitate 
to move in the abyss. That detachment from his own 
working hypothesis which the student of science owes 
to the end of his journey shall we claim of the student 
of ethics also ? Surely there is but one assumption in 
Ariadne F/oretitina — that wherewith nearly all thinkers 



228 JOHN RUSKIN. 

(including Kant, but, I suppose, excluding Nietzche) 
have done their work — that is, the confession of the 
moral law : that there is a good, and that pure cruelty, 
mere hatred, and ingratitude, for example, are contrary 
thereto. This book, in which so many things are 
pursued so far with an infinite courage, enterprise, and 
good-will, takes no more than this for granted, but takes 
it to heart — takes it so that neither height nor depth 
nor any other creature can separate the author from his 
assumption. 

Everything following that was to be proved seems to 
be proved and demonstrated. One exception there is 
perhaps, and one that must make a strange effect of 
bathos stated here, but — ■ 

" Thou canst not pluck a llower 
Without troubling of a star ; " 

— and there is nothing touched in these lectures but to 
great issues : I mean the apparently arbitrary law tacitly 
established whereby Ruskin separates oil-painting from 
all the other arts, and makes it solitary, judging it by 
other theories and on other terms than theirs. The 
sculptor, the draughtsman, the engraver are instructed to 
decide " what are the essential points in the things they 
see." Such decision is declared to be " a habit entirely 
necessary to strong humanity," and "natural to all 
humanity." And yet painting — oil-painting — is placed 
in the very next sentence under the disability (Ruskin 
here, for the purpose of his argument at the moment, 
confesses the disability) of a difference from all the arts 



'ARIADNE FLORENTINA.' 229 

in this respect : " Painting, when it is complete, leaves 
it much to your own judgment what to look at ; and, if 
you are a fool, you look at the wrong thing : but in a 
fine woodcut the master says, ' You shall look at this 
or nothing.' " 

When an artist to-day insists upon calling his work 
a " pattern " he does no more than Ruskin whom he 
thinks to oppose and refute, but who has said, for all 
to hear — 

"You know I told you a sculptor's business is first 
to cover a surface with pleasant bosses, whether they 
mean anything or not ; so an engraver's is to cover it 
with pleasant lines, whether they mean anything or not. 
I'hat they should mean something is indeed desirable 
afterwards ; but first we must be ornamental." 

But with colour this whole theory is tyrannously (or 
a modern reader will hold it to be tyrannously) altered. 
It is this insistence upon a certain kind of "complete- 
ness " in painting only and solely that has set the enmity 
(seeming to strike deep but not striking deep) between 
this the greatest of all teachers of art and some of the 
greatest of designers and composers who were also 
painters ; and it is his insistence in this book upon 
local colour as the chief thing wherewith oil-painting 
is concerned that is the cause of his distrust, his dis- 
approval, at best his half-praise, of some of the greatest 
painters of illumination and darkness, those who painted 
colour effaced, half-effaced, just recognised by flashes, 
fully confessed in turn by the over-ruling light. 



230 JOHN RUSKIN. 

Let me hazard the suggestion that Ruskin seems 
resolved, in treating the Gothic or colour schools, to set 
his painter with his back to the sun, so that he shall see 
all things, illuminated indeed but strong in their own 
colour ; and forbids him to face the sun and to see all 
the world as it looks in that great confrontation — lustrous 
and illuminated indeed, but made up of infinite and 
innumerable shadow. But why should not the colourist 
look with the sun to-day and towards the sun to-morrow, 
and belong to both the two great schools by that simple 
power of taking both stations ? A man and the sun may 
surely be allowed a complex and various relation with 
one another. True, Ruskin's theory of local colour was 
learnt in front of the works of the Tuscans, and above 
all in the Library of Siena, but is nothing to be added 
to Tuscany, by Holland, by Norwich, by France ? His 
own Turner faced the sun, and he himself faces the sun 
in half his writings. 

Ruskin — to me, I have to confess hardly intelligibly 
— joins the positive definite sight (the sight, let me call 
it, that you get, looking with the sun) to the high powers 
of imagination. He avers that the Italian master re- 
quires you to imagine a St Elizabeth, and to see her with 
all completeness ; but that the Dutch painter " only 
wishes you to imagine an effect of sunlight on cow-skin, 
which is a far lower strain of the imaginative faculty." 
Moreover, he calls the feeling for colour modified by 
sun a mere sensation — the device of men, who, " not 
being able to get any pleasure out of their thoughts, try 



'ARIADNE FLORENTINA.' 23I 

to get it out of their sensations." This may have been 
accidentally the act of some chiaroscuro painters ; but 
is it essentially the act of all ? And is this clear seeing 
of St Elizabeth in her red and blue essentially the work 
of the imagination and not of the mere fancy? 

Surely there is no other occasion of controversy in 
this masterly book, wrought out of the very life of the 
intellect. We find this important word spoken to the 
student of engraving, at the outset : " Your own char- 
acter will form your style, . . . but my business is to 
prevent, as far as I can, your having a?iy particular style." 
This goes to the root, for all the arts. The technical 
lessons follow : — 

"Engraving means, primarily, making a permanent 
cut or furrow. . . . The central syllable of the word 
has become a sorrowful one, meaning the most per- 
manent of furrows. . . . Stone engraving is the art 
of countries possessing marble and gems ; wood en- 
graving, of countries overgrown with forest ; metal 
engraving, of countries possessing treasures of silver and 
gold. And the style of a stone engraver is found on 
pillars and pyramids ; the style of a wood engraver 
under the eaves of larch cottages ; the style of a metal 
engraver in the treasuries of kings. Do you suppose I 
could rightly explain to you the value of a single touch 
on brass by Finiguerra, or on box by Bewick, unless 
I had grasp of the great laws of climate and country ; 
and could trace the inherited sirocco or tramontana 
of thought to which the souls and bodies of the men 
owed their existence ? " 

He has that " grasp " ; and explains principally the 
inheritance of the Florentine and that of the German — 



232 JOHN RUSKIN. 

Sandro Botticelli and Holbein. " Holbein is a civilised 
boor ; Botticelli a re-animate Greek." And this is his 
admirable judgment of the relation of these two to 
the recovered ancient learning and to the classic spirit : 
that learning was probably cumbrous to Holbein. 

" But Botticelli receives it as a child in later years 
recovers the forgotten dearness of a nursery tale ; 
and is more himself, and again and again himself, as 
he breathes the air of Greece, and hears, in his own 
Italy, the lost voice of the Sibyl murmur again by the 
Avernus Lake. ... It destroys Raphael ; but it 
graces him, and is a part of him. It all but destroys 
Mantegna ; but it graces him. And it does not hurt 
Holbein, just because it does not grace him — never for 
an instant is part of him." 

Was ever judgment more exquisite ? And this, on 
Florence herself: — 

"The second Greeks — these Florentine Greeks 
re-animate — are human more strongly, more deeply, 
leaping from the Byzantine death at the call of Christ, 
* Loose him and let him go ! ' " 

Take also this great passage. Ruskin himself avers 
that it contains the most audacious, and the most 
valuable, statement he had made, on practical art, in 
these lectures. He had seen that the study of anatomy 
brought with it a certain injury, but he had sought 
the ruin of the Masters — Tintoretto for example — 
elsewhere. 

"And then at last I got hold of the true clue: 'II 
disegno di Michelangiolo.' And the moment I had 



'ARIADNE FI,ORENTINA.' 233 

dared to accuse that, it explained everything; and I 
saw that the betraying demons of Itah'an art, led on 
by Michael Angelo, had been, not pleasure, but know- 
ledge ; not indolence, but ambition ; and not love, 
but horror." 

From the study of Botticelli's Sibyls, full of divine 
perceptions, I take this little passage : it adorns the 
description of the Libyan Sibyl, " loveliest of the 
Southern Pythonesses " : — 

" A less deep thinker than Botticelli would have 
made her parched with thirst, and burnt with heat. 
But the voice of God, through nature, to the Arab or 
the Moor, is not in the thirst, but in the fountain, not 
in the desert, but in the grass of it. And this Libyan 
Sibyl is the spirit of wild grass and flowers, springing 
in desolate places." 

In treating of Holbein, with a triumph for Holbein's 
simplicity over even Diirer's gifts, Ruskin makes use 
of some theology. He ought not to have permitted 
himself to use other men's habits of phrase by speaking 
of an "Lidulgence" as a "permission to sin."' The 
knowledge that, according to the definition of those 
who hold the doctrine, an Indulgence (or remission 
of canonical penance) cannot be gained at all without 
a resolution never to commit any sin of any kind 
whatever, is knowledge easily accessible. Here, finally, 
is the magnificent page, on one of the plates of the 
" Dance of Death " : — 

"The labourer's country cottage — the rain coming 
through its roof, the clay crumbling from its partitions, 



234 JOHN RUSKIN. 

the fire lighted with a few chips and sticks on a raised 
piece of the mud floor. . . . But the mother can 
warm the child's supper of bread and milk so — holding 
the pan by the long handle ; and on mud floor though 
it be, they are happy — she and her child, and its 
brother — if only they could be left so. They shall 
not be left so : the young thing must leave them — 
will never need milk to be warmed for it any more. 
It would fain stay — sees no angels — feels only an 
icy grip on its hand, and that it cannot stay. Those 
who love it shriek and tear their hair in vain, amazed 
in grief. ' Oh, little one, thou must lie out in the fields 
then, not even under this poor torn roof of thy mother's 
to-night ! ' ■' 



235 



CHAPTER XXII. 

'VAL D'ARNO' (1874). 

These ten Slade Lectures are historical studies of Tus- 
can art during that great act of the war of Guelph and 
Ghibelline which had its centre in the middle of the 
thirteenth century in the city of Florence. The reader 
may hesitate at the outset to undertake Val d'Arno if 
he fears politics so transfigured as in the third paragraph, 
in which the mountains rehearse the solid and rational 
authority of the State ; and the clouds " the more or 
less spectral, hooded, imaginative, and nubiforni author- 
ity of the Pope, and Church." Furthermore, Ruskin 
uses the names of the Montagus or Montacutes, and 
the Capulets or Cappelletti — " the hatted, scarlet-hatted, 
or hooded " — as but lurking names for Ghibelline and 
Guelph ; and in the tower and the dome he sees figures 
of the same two powers dividing the great Middle Ages, 
and contending in arms upon the Lombard plains and 
in the valley of that Tuscan river which carried the 
whispers of Florence to the walled banks of the sea- 
ward city. These allegories in act are somewhat ex- 



236 JOHN RUSKIN. 

cessive in their ingenuity ; but the history that follows 
shows Ruskin's severe hold of facts, the facts upon 
which the historian waits as a surgeon upon the pulse 
of a man he cannot help. Ruskin has to tell vital 
history, and therefore spiritual history ; and he looks 
so closely for spiritual human meaning into the am- 
biguous faces of Charles of Anjou and Manfred, Fred- 
erick II. and Innocent IV. (very much in the manner 
of Carlyle, whom he called his master), that it is 
well he should have the resolution to withdraw, in 
turn, to the distance that commands the origins and 
issues of human history, and that from a high place 
he should see also these similitudes of clouds and 
armies, mountains and dynasties, and men as trees 
walking. 

Ruskin is punctual in his science of historical judg- 
ment, and will not allow a passage of five years in that 
great mid-century, the thirteenth, to leave so much as 
one equivocal record. And as the momentous work 
done by Nicola Pisano yields all its significance to this 
scrutiny, so does that antique work which prompted 
him. So like each other as a pod and a bud may seem 
in the eyes of those who do not well know the 
plant, so may the decadence and the promise of that 
various Greek work which we call Byzantine. As to 
some passage of sculpture we may ask, is this the im- 
potence of decline — or rather of the time after decline, 
or is it the difficulty of youth ? Somewhat there is, 
hampered or folded — in the right sense implicit. From 



'VAL D'aRNO.' 237 

Val d'Arno we learn that both the withered and the 
vital existed in contemporary Greek work — twelfth- 
century Byzantine ; some of this art was in the husk 
and some in the sheath, if one may use again the 
figure of the plant. Vasari did not distinguish the 
one from the other : and some that is of the husk is 
held in honour at the Lateran, and some that is of 
the sheath at Pisa. 

From the Sarcophagus with Meleager's hunt on it 
Nicola Pisano learnt that which was the beginning of 
Modern Art. This derivation of life, which to the less 
accurate eye seemed to be going forward in a general 
and broadcast revival, Ruskin traces through this one 
strait way, through this one Greek sculpture and this one 
Tuscan sculptor, showing it to be here, and here only, a 
derivation of veritable life : one genealogy, the counsels 
of one mind, one genius, one little ten years' work — how 
narrow is the pass, how slight the thread, how single 
the issue ! The authentic art, how local, and how 
brief! In the pulpit of Nicola at Pisa (the student may 
study the model at South Kensington), and especially 
in its five cusped arches — trefoils — Ruskin, as single 
in the recognition as the Pisan in the design, recog- 
nised the first architecture of Gothic Christianity, and 
discovered its point of junction with the art of Greece. 
He defends and holds this pass of authenticity, this 
patent, despite some adverse guides who seem to have 
pushed their way by other outlets ; but let it be borne 
in mind that what Ruskin has traced of the delicate 



238 JOHN RUSKIN. 

differences in the history of art he has gauged not by 
the eye only, but also by the finger. He has followed 
the sculptor by drawing ; has felt sensibly and directly 
the direction of the bygone human hand ; has " remem- 
bered in tranquillity the emotion " of another ; and has 
traced the working of hour by hour that was charged 
with all the fortunes of the Second Civilisation. A 
pulpit was this significant piece of art, not an altar nor 
a tomb ; and the Greek sculpture that inspired it was 
on a sarcophagus, — facts that somewhat (though rather 
by chance) jar with Ruskin's conclusion to this same 
chapter : " Christian architecture ... is for the glory 
of death, . . . and is to the end definable as archi- 
tecture of the tomb." Upon this follows a fine passage 
upon tombs and their treasure, with the incidental 
addition : — 

" It has been thought, gentlemen, that there is a fine 
Gothic revival in your streets of Oxford, because you 
have a Gothic door to your County Bank. Remember, 
at all events, it was other kind of buried treasure, and 
bearing other interest, which Nicola Pisano's Gothic was 
set to guard," 

At Perugia arose the marble sculptured fountain of 
Giovanni Pisano, at Siena that of Jacopo della Querela. 
Ruskin felt bitter regret that he had not seen the Sienese 
fountain, before it had been torn to pieces and restored, 
except with heedless eyes when he had been a boy. 

" I observe that Charles Dickens had the fortune 



'VAL D'aRNO.' 239 

denied to me. ' The market-place, or great Piazza, is 
a large square, with a great broken-nosed fountain in it.' 
lyPictii res from Italy.) " 

The historical essay contained in these lectures 
begins with a passage that opens a door from on high 
upon a historic country. As the generalising historian 
of our first lessons was wont to talk of watersheds and 
watering rivers, dull as a map, Ruskin, using an 
equally large gesture, shows a landscape-nation : the 
valleys of Lombardy, of Etruria, and of Rome — of the 
Po, the Arno, and the Tiber — fertile with the various 
vitality of Italy ; the chivalry of Germany, of France, 
and of the Saracen riding those fields in war. Against 
some brief historic judgments in his own wilful manner 
— sudden judgments making, strangely enough, a hasty 
end of prolonged and difficult thought — the reader 
revolts. Here is one : " Before the twelfth century 
the nations were too savage to be Christian, and after 
the fifteenth too carnal." To the glory of these four 
hundred years, then, he sacrifices at a blow the 
Thebaid, Chrysostom and Nazianzen, Augustine and 
Gregory, and the multitude of Bishoprics of North 
Africa, and the great Christian peasant populations of 
the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth 
centuries, who have laboured in patience upon Breton, 
Provengal, Lombard, Tuscan, Irish earth. It is of 
nations, not of States, that Ruskin speaks ; otherwise, 
we should have granted him that States have not been 
Christian ; the historian can hardly venture to claim 



240 JOHN RUSKIN. 

that name for the German Empire or the French 
Monarchy, or the temporal power of the Papacy. 
Ruskin further explains his four hundred years : — 

" The delicacy of sensation and refinements of 
imagination necessary to understand Christianity belong 
to the mid period when men, risen from a life of brutal 
hardship, are not yet fallen to one of brutal luxury." 

Whether brutal luxury is a name fit for the softer arts of 
life — to use the usual word, the " comforts " — learnt by 
mankind since the fifteenth century, I know not ; it is 
at any rate a tenable opinion that the most brutal 
thing about them is that they belong to a minority. 
But granting this, there are yet perpetual generations of 
men living in precisely this condition, — " risen from a 
life of brutal hardship and not yet fallen to one of 
brutal luxury." Assuredly that condition was not con- 
fined to a few violent and unhappy centuries, centuries 
when for a superstition little children were dashed 
against the stones of their poor villages. Imperial or 
Papal ; when, for a calumny, the young devout 
Templars, flowers of masculine innocence, self-sacrifice, 
and good faith, were burnt alive, a score at one time ; 
when, for a jealousy of trade, one furious city lay in 
wait for the destruction of another ; when the revenge 
upon a political enemy was to hew his son's head off 
before his eyes, so as to make a last spectacle for those 
eyes before they were put out, and ten years in a 
dungeon without a page to read or a tree to look at 
was a common prelude to penal death. Not then 



'VAL D'ARNO.' 241 

only did a people obscure, unnamed, innumerable, live 
somewhere between savagery and luxury, but century 
by century ever since then. All the centuries have 
brought this life to pass, and the race has followed this 
narrow way by a multitude that no man can number. 
Moreover, is that passage, between crude conditions 
and effete, trodden only by a people corporately? A 
man lately freed from the main force that compelled 
his childhood, and generously simple in that freedom, 
not yet slothful or fond of money, is somewhat in the 
condition of Ruskin's nations, released from savagery 
and not corrupt. 

From that more direct teaching of art, for which the 
student will consult Val d'Artio, may be cited a subtle 
refutation, or rather correction, of the modern principle 
as to " decorating construction." A brief study of the 
decoration of the porch of the Baptistery at Pisa shows 
us how arbitrary is all great decoration. Construction 
is followed indeed, but with happy choice, decision, and 
difference, whereby one member is richly and intently 
adorned, and another left blank — the construction 
giving no suggestion of such caprice. To decorate 
your construction, we learn, is a good rule for one who 
should be barely conscious of it ; but for a sculptor 
without the good fortune of genius it is at once too 
much and too little — it shows the way but does not 
teach the walk ; and he who thinks he has but to follow 
the road would have a languid movement. So, too, 
would the rhymer who wrote iambics without inspira- 

Q 



242 JOHN RUSKIN. 

tion in the transposition of accents and of quantities. 
As, in The Seven Lamps^ Ruskin showed how the outer 
colouring of buildings had all its vitality in its own 
arbitrary design, so he shows the sculptural decoration 
to have also, though less independently, a life of its 
own. The life of the material, too, he touches in 
the chapters on " Marble Couchant " and " Marble 
Rampant," and the nature, the place, and the history 
of the stone, respected by the ancient builders, who laid 
it as it had lain in the quarry. And here, by the way, 
is another of those sayings that should long ago have 
corrected the usual misunderstanding of Ruskin's 
doctrine : " You are ... an artist by animating your 
copy of nature into vital variation." Ruskin goes on to 
tell that the " reserved variation " of the Greeks had for 
a time escaped him, but that he had at last found them 
to be as various as the Goths; and that the Greek sea 
or river whirl-pool, varied infinitely, was the main source 
of the spiral or rampant decoration of Gothic, and of 
the luxuriant design of the early Pisans. Of Giovanni 
Pisano Ruskin has written : " To him you owe . . . the 
grace of Ghiberti, the tenderness of Raphael, the awe 
of Michael Angelo. Second-rate qualities in all three, 
but precious in their kind." Great is this mind that 
recognises the "awe" of Buonarroti as the second-rate 
quality of a great man. Ruskin's mind was in fact 
immortally antique, and in possession of inseparable 
Greek antecedents, whatever it found to do in the 
altering world. The ethical sermon of Val d^Arno is 



'VAL D'ARNO.' 243 

chiefly on that text of Carlyle's whereof the warning has 
been in vain : — 

" This idle habit of accounting for the ' moral sense ' 
— the moral sense, thank God, is a thing you never 
will ' account for.' ... By no greatest happiness 
principle, greatest nobleness principle, or any principle 
whatever, will you make that in the least clearer. . . . 
Visible infinites : . . . say nothing of them, . . . for 
you can say nothing wise." 



244 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

'DEUCALION' (1875-1883). 

In 1875 Ruskin prefaced Deucalion with an ironic sketch 
of the unachieved work for which he had until then 
collected material : an analysis of the Attic art of the 
fifth century i;.c. ; an exhaustive history of northern 
thirteenth-century art ; a history of Florentine fifteenth- 
century art ; a life of Turner, with analysis of modern 
landscape art \ a life of Walter Scott ; a life of Xenophon, 
with analysis of the general principles of education ; a 
commentary on Hesiod ; and a general description of 
the geology and botany of the Alps, Meanwhile, at the 
outset of this little work, chiefly on geology, he finds 
place for a brilliant essay on heraldic colours, fairly 
p-oves " gules " to be derived from the Zoroastrian w^ord 
for rose, and not from the Latin and Romance words 
for a red throat of prey ; quotes St Bernard on this 
accidental subject, and corrects the " badgers' skins " 
that were hung with rams' skins upon the Tabernacle 
of Israel, to seals' — from the sea-flocks that then swam 
the Mediterranean by the city of Phoca^a, and were 



'DEUCALION.' 245 

assigned to Proteus in the Odyssey. Deucalion^ Pivsei-- 
pina, and an essay on birds — Love's Meinie — are the 
nearest approach that other labours allowed to the 
works on natural history threatened, with a smile — the 
geology and botany were to be " in twenty-four volumes " 
— and they are strangely complete, full of that natural 
fact which Ruskin has acknowledged as at once the 
justification and the judge of art, the beginning and the 
never-attainable end. It is perhaps with a contemptuous 
consent to be, by some, misread, that in his contention 
on glaciers with Professor Tyndall he often slights the 
name of "science" and "man of science"; whereas 
obviously it was on the point of science that issue was 
joined, and if he did not reproach his adversary in that 
this adversary was too little and not too much a man of 
science, he reproached him to no purpose. Ruskin, 
intending to teach the form of mountains as they 
have stood since man was man, and as they have suffered 
the daily strokes of rains or have carried the varying 
burden of snow, makes very sure of the little he has to 
tell of the anatomy of those clothed figures. The up- 
heaving forces of the first remote period and the sculp- 
tural forces of the second are treated with the brevity 
that befits their unknown ages and immeasurable action ; 
but to the disintegrating and diffusing forces of the 
earth as the eyes of man have known it, Ruskin gives 
the study of many a year. The human race has had 
many and many centuries in which to watch the Alps 
— and has made small use thereof; but out of those 



246 JOHN KUSKIN. 

ages of ages a littlu half-century has been saved— the 
years of this one man's studies ; and all that fifty years 
can tell, in pledge of the rest unobserved and unrecorded, 
was read by him with his own eyes directly, immediately, 
without feigning, without use of the reading of others, 
with experiment and verification — experiment on the 
spot, and experiment depending upon time. All that 
fifty years could tell to this watchful intellect, from first 
to last, is told for ever, with so much of retrospect and 
prophecy as a slow half- century of the life of rocks 
affords. Ruskin has been for this space of time the 
contemporary of the Alps and of the Alpine rivers, an 
effectual contemporary who measured the patience of 
his years with the long labours of weather and of gravita- 
tion in the heights and valleys. Of the years of the 
Alps it may be said that fifty were also his. This 
specimen of mountain existence — this great echantilloji 
and sample of many thousand ages, is, as it were, saved 
and put upon human record. It is saved by one man's 
watch well kept, as, in another region of experience, a 
specimen of passionate emotion, difficult because of its 
brevity, as the movement of mountains is difficult because 
of its length, is saved by the instant watch of a poet 
well kept, and put upon human record. 

Assuredly it is not too much to claim for Ruskin's 
work on the Alps and the Jura that it was, conspicuously, 
and unlike that of other glacialists, all observation and 
all experiment ; there were, in its course, no guesses. 
Therefore he corrected some inferences of his fellow- 



'DEUCALION.' 247 

workers', and in particular ratified with a great addition 
James Forbes's discovery of the general internal thaw of 
Alpine snows : Ruskin it is who finds an argument in 
the "subsiding languor" of the flowing glacier. His 
work of observation is necessarily accompanied by theory 
and by calculation. On all these grounds he contends 
with Professor Tyndall, and the contention, to be 
properly understood, needs much more than the mere 
reading of the lecture, even with the help of the diagrams. 
For the voice must have expressed ironies that the print 
does but point with a note of admiration ; moreover, the 
hearers had Mr Tyndall's assertions that ice could not 
stretch fresh in their memories, and were ready to be 
surprised by Ruskin's proof that ice, in fact, could stretch. 
Not that all was irony ; there was some hard hitting. 

" His incapacity of drawing, and ignorance of per- 
spective, prevented him from constructing his diagrams 
either clearly enough to show him his own mistakes, 
or prettily enough to direct the attention of his friends 
to them : and they luckily remain to us, in their 
absurd immortality." 

In regard to the other subject specially under exam- 
ination — the action of mountain rivers — Ruskin has 
concluded that the cutting or deepening work of these 
waters was done under conditions unknown to the pres- 
ent race of man, and that there has been no action 
except that of the lifting of river-beds and the encum- 
bering of water-courses, since the earth has been man's 
world. But this judgment upon the facts of the past — 



248 JOHN kUSKlN. 

whether measurably or immeasurably far — serves in 
Ruskin's studies entirely to inform the eyes of those 
who are to look upon the aspect of the present, and 
who need that their simplicity in understanding and 
their vigilance in seeing should be strengthened by 
knowledge. It is the present in the act of passage 
that the eyes are to be made ready to perceive, and 
the lesson is one for painters — indeed for impression- 
ists : the mountain, the cleft, the water -courses with 
their past so sealed, and their present so slowly to be 
known, are landscape facing the simple eyes of a 
painter. At the close of his subtle and exact — essen- 
tially most logical — reasoning on geology the author 
of Deucalion refuses the name of philosopher, and 
avers that his teaching is that of the village showman's 
" Look, and you shall see." But the fact that he him- 
self has laboured so explicitly over two but partially 
visible things — geology and the past — proves how 
much he himself had to owe to the promptings and the 
checkings whereby knowledge guards simplicity, and 
how little he would trust any student but a genius to 
the guidance of the first simplicity. It is surely for 
the second simplicity that he so profoundly prepares. 
It must not, however, be forgotten that although 
Ruskin worked for art with the single and present in- 
tention of giving authority to the plain observer, he 
had long studied the Alpine country, as he tells us, 
" with the practical hope of arousing the attention of 
the Swiss and Italian peasantry to an intelligent ad- 



'DEUCALION.' 249 

ministration of the natural treasures of their woods and 
streams." And as he would have done something to 
arrest the distress and disease of the peasantry of the 
Valais — people whom hereditary and natural adversity 
had forced to grief but never to despair — so he had 
offered suggestions for the protection of Verona from 
the turbulent Adige above the city, and for the succour 
of the Romans from inundation. The Italian Gov- 
ernment spent the taxes of agriculture, however, not 
on the defences of river cities threatened by mountain 
streams, but in the decking of Tuscan cities with 
Parisian boulevards 

At the risk of dwelling too much upon the mere 
controversy of Deucalion, I must extract the brilliant 
phrase of rebuke : — 

" The delicate experiments by the conduct of which 
Professor Tyndall brought his audiences into what he 
is pleased to call ' contact with facts ' (in olden times 
we used to say ' grasp of facts ' : modern science, for 
its own part, prefers, not unreasonably, the term ' con- 
tact,' expressive merely of occasional collision with 
them) must remain inconclusive." 

Remember always that " modern science " is reproved, 
throughout, for defect of science; the phrase "occa- 
sional collision with facts," in derision of the Professor's 
"contact," is exquisitely and characteristically witty. 
In truth, whatever may be the chances of war as to the 
case in controversy, ill befalls Ruskin's antagonist in 
words : he has the scholarship, the invention, the spirit, 



250 JOHN RUSKIN. 

the delicacy, and the luck of language. Take another 
reproof — that which he administered to the " scien- 
tific people " who had taken the name of Angiiis, the 
strangling thing — a name that was used in Latin for 
the more terrible forms of snake — to give it "to those 
which can't strangle anything. The Angiiis fragilis 
breaks like a tobacco-pipe ; but imagine how discon- 
certing such an accident would be to a constrictor ! " 
This occurs in the fragmentary chapter on " Living 
Waves," making one volume with Deucalion, in which 
Ruskin accompanies (but without contention, in this 
case, and with none but harmonious banter) a lecture 
of Professor Huxley's. The chapter is a kind of spirit- 
ual version of the development of species, and a study 
in hereditary imagination. 



251 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

'PROSERPINA' (1875-1886). 

This gentle, ardent, and boyish boy must have breathed 
hard and close over his collections of minerals and 
plants. He was unsatisfied with knowledge, and the 
books, few and arid, in which he looked for figures and 
definitions, although good in the main and sure of his 
respect, failed him as the " modern science " of later 
times was to fail him : he charged them with futile 
words and with the blanks, instead of answers, that 
met some of his pertinent questions. What he began 
over a boy's cabinet and herbarium he never afterwards 
forsook. He was a reader — and an untiring one — 
only in the second place ; he studied crystallisation 
and plants, as he studied the spiritual nature of man, 
at first hand. Proserpina, a book of botany made 
lovely, was written " to put, if it might be, some 
elements of the science . . . into a form more tenable 
by ordinary human and childish faculties" than had 
been the form wherewith the faculties, human and 
childish in the highest sense, of his own elect boyhood 



252 JOHN RUSKIN. 

had wrought as they could, docile and zealous, and 
ill-supplied, making much of little, but yet often dis- 
appointed. Proserpma had for its accessory title, 
" Studies of Wayside Flowers while the Air was yet 
pure among the Alps and in the Scotland and England 
which my Father knew." It is illustrated by the writer's 
noble drawings. The particular charm of the book 
is that it is a real meditation upon the theme, the work 
of one who lets the reader see process and progress. 
And the value is in this — that the questions it considers 
are problems of the flowers, which the botany book left 
him, as a boy and afterwards, to read in their aspect 
and to answer if he could. The first chapter is full 
of questions, some answered, some unanswered, on 
Moss — the gold and green and " the black, which 
gives the precious Velasquez touches " • and what the 
eye, slightly helped by a magnifying glass, sees of the 
tiny structure of the moss of walls and woods is de- 
scribed with infinite grace. The chapter on the Leaf 
is memorable for a paragraph in which Ruskin relates 
his misadventures amongst the authorities on botany 
in his search of instruction as to the nature of sap. 
Sap was not in the index of Dresser, nor scve in that 
of Figuier. Lindley told him of " the course taken 
by the sap after entering a plant." " My dear doctor, 
. . . you know, far better than I, that sap never does 
enter a plant at all ; but only salt, or earth and water, 
and that the roots alone could not make it." Memor- 
able is also this from the same chapter — "that vital 



'PROSERPINA.' 253 

power, which scientific people are usually as afraid of 
naming as common people are of naming Death." 
Ruskin proposes, as he goes, a new nomenclature, 
more scholarly and more strict — pure Latin, pure 
Greek when a distinction is needed, pure English con- 
currently. Nor will he have nursery literature to go 
wild with a semblance of precision, uncorrected. This 
he rebukes with a sweetness that the professors do 
not get from him ; but when a lady, writing pretty 
lessons for children, makes an easy show of defining 
a weed as a plant that has got into the wrong place, 
Ruskin retorts, " Some plants never do. Who ever 
saw a wood anemone or a heath blossom in the wrong 
place ? Who ever saw a nettle ... in the right 
one ? " He cannot know much, by the way, of Swiss 
country households in spring who has not seen the 
good woman cutting young nettles into her apron, for 
the soup ; good for the blood, and an excellent vegetable 
after the salt food of a mountain winter, is this. But 
has Ruskin or any one failed to welcome that early 
little tender nettle when the March earth is dark brown 
under the cloudy skies, and full of life, and along the 
foot of the hedgerows the sod scarce heaves for the 
delicate nettle and a celandine or two? Anon, Proser- 
pina has the " scentless daisy," making much of the 
humility of that flower of light. It is true that many 
grown-up people never smell a daisy, which has a 
small fragrance close to itself; but had Ruskin for 
once forgotten his early childhood ? These are but 



254 JOHN RUSKIN. 

accidents, and they merely serve to make somewhat 
tedious the perpetual moral lessons : for an example 
or a warning to go with every flower is endurable only 
when all the facts are beyond question. What is 
important and characteristic is the original and final 
resolve of this mind to confess and maintain the 
properties that men call noble, beautiful, evil, noisome, 
ignoble, to be so veritably, in the sense known to them 
and to their fathers, absolutely — the perception of such 
qualities being not only a fact to be reckoned with, 
at least as gravely as other facts are reckoned with, 
but a divine power of the human spirit, its judgment 
of the world. It is perhaps an unanswerable question 
whether, keeping this fast hold upon the idea of an 
essential good, Ruskin has not followed it into arbitrary 
ways, attributing to things a good and an evil that are 
in truth nothing but the tradition of men beset by the 
collective memory of their primitive dangers and neces- 
sities, and by the individual memory of their own 
race-dreams in childhood. With the moral lesson of 
Proserpina, only once or twice importunate, and always 
noble, severe, and benign, are mingled such feats of 
illustration, allusion, and intricate history as those 
of the chapter on the Poppy. Ruskin's persevering eye 
saw the poppy confused with the grape by the Byzantine 
Greeks, and the poppy and the grape with palm fruit ; 
saw the palm, in the stenography of design, pass into 
a nameless symmetrical ornament and thence into the 
Greek iris (Homer's blue iris, and Pindar's water-flag) ; 



'PROSERPINA.' 255 

saw it read by tlie Florentines, when they made 
Byzantine art their own, into their fleur-de-lys, with 
two poppyheads on each side of the entire foil in 
their finest heraldry ; saw, on the other hand, the 
poppy altering the acanthus - leaf under the chisel 
of the Greek, until the northern worker of the twelfth 
century took the thistle-head for the poppy, and the 
thistle-leaf for the acanthus, the true poppy-head re- 
maining in the south, but more and more confused 
with grapes, until the Renaissance sculptors are con- 
tent with any boss full of seed, but insist always upon 
some such pod as an important part of their ornament 
— the bean-pods of Brunelleschi's lantern at Florence, 
for example. 

"Through this vast range of art note this singular 
fact, that the wheat-ear, the vine, the ileur-de-lys, the 
poppy, and the jagged leaf of the acanthus-weed, or 
thistle, occupy the entire thoughts of the decorative 
workmen trained in classic schools, to the exclusion of 
the rose, the true lily, and other flowers of luxury." 

A mingling of subtle history with morals gives us 
an admirable page on noble Scottish character in the 
chapter on the Thistle. In that on the Stem we have 
a vigorous instruction upon that spiral growing which 
expresses a flame of life, as in the trunks of great 
chestnut-trees ; of that subtle action Ruskin has drawn 
an example in a waste-thistle. We have also a lesson 
upon the structural change of direction that always takes 
place at the point where branches begin to assert them- 



256 JOHN RUSKIN. 

selves. Who else has caused us so to feel the wood, its 
direction, its law, its liberty, its seasons, and the years 
of its Hfe ? I, as one of so many whose parents read 
Modem Painters in their own youth, remember my 
father's pointing to a tree and telling me that whereas 
the Old Masters were apt to draw the stem of a diminish- 
ing or tapering form, Ruskin had made us all to see 
that no stem ever grows less until it puts forth a branch, 
and no branch until it puts forth a twig. And ever after 
I have felt the stem live, as I could never have felt it 
had I continued to think it a thing so paltry that it 
could diminish as it grew. Who but Ruskin, more- 
over, has had this sense of the mathematics of tender 
things? — "I never saw such a lovely perspective line 
as the pure front leaf profile," he says of some 
violet. 

One of the principal intentions in the writing of 
Froserpitia was the planning — with a boy's pleasure 
added to a scholar's — of the new terminology that was 
to be acceptable to students in the five languages — 
Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and English. 

" I shall not be satisfied unless I can feel that the 
little maids who gather their first violets under the 
Acropolis rock may receive for them ^schylean words 
again with joy. I shall not be content unless the 
mothers watching their children at play, in the Ceramicus 
of Paris, . . . may yet teach them there to know the 
flowers which the Maid of Orleans gathered at Domremy. 
I shall not be satisfied unless every word I ask from 
the lips of the children of Florence and Rome may 



'PROSERPINA. 257 

enable them better to praise the flowers that are chosen 
by the hand of Matilda and bloom around the tomb of 
Virgil." 

Incidentally we have a brief passage of autobiography 
telling how Ruskin travelled when he was young, in a 
little carriage of his own, full of pockets ; and an inn is 
mentioned as having been described by Dickens " in his 
wholly matchless manner." Wholly matchless ; and it 
is this great describer who says so. Now and then there 
is a slight shock of encounter between them. At 
Boulogne Dickens thanked Heaven that no Englishman 
had been up the tower in the high walled town, to 
measure it ; at that time Ruskin was, in fact, measuring 
towers. Finally, from this little book on Botany, written 
with great simplicity, may be taken a description by 
Ruskin of his own language : " Honest English, of good 
Johnsonian lineage, touched here and there with colour 
of a little finer or Elizabethan quality." 



258 



CHAPTER XXV. 
GUIDE-BOOKS. 

'Mornings in Florence' (1875-1877). 

'St Mark's Rest' (1877-1884). 
'The Bible of Amiens' (1880-1885). 

Mornings in Florence was written definitely as a guide- 
book — for six mornings with six lessons to be learnt in 
them. The chapters on Giotto are of the first import- 
ance ; the reader cannot in this volume be taken, even 
briefly, through Giotto at Padua (1853-1860), or the 
abundant studies of Giotto's works at Assisi, widely 
scattered through Ruskin's writings ; but he must 
understand Giotto to be Ruskin's original master in 
mediaeval lineal art, as Nicola Pisano in mediaeval 
sculpture \ and Florence is Giotto's own city, containing 
his work done at all dates between his twelfth year and 
his sixtieth. Ruskin teaches us how to connect the work 
of his best time with his work in architecture, and with 
the Franciscan Order. To Giotto's fresco at Santa 
Maria Novella we are led through " a rich overture, . . . 



GUIDE BOOKS. 



259 



and here is a tune of four notes, on a shepherd's pipe." 
The theme is the meeting of St Joachim and St Anne, 
as it would be "according to Shakespeare or Giotto." 
There, too, is his "Presentation of the Virgin." 

" The boy who tried so hard to draw those steps in 
perspective had been carried down others, to his grave, 
two hundred years before Titian ran alone at Cadore. 
But, as surely as Venice looks on the sea, Titian looked 
on this, and caught the reflected light of it for ever." 

Colour, too, Giotto founded. But all he began of 
Mediaeval art was the continuation of Antiquity. His 
painting of a Gothic chapel Ruskin affirms to be but 
the painting of a Greek vase inverted, with the figures 
on the concave, as those on the convex, surface, bent 
in and out, possibly and impossibly, but always " living 
and full of grace." 

" Every line of the Florentine chisel in the fifteenth 
century is based on national principles of art which 
existed in the seventh century before Christ." 

The chapter called " The Shepherd's Tower " is also, 
of course, on Giotto ; and the tower was written of 
divinely in The Seven Lamps. Here we have a close 
reading of the sculptures of the campanile, whether 
Giotto's own or Andrea Pisano's — and Ruskin has 
worked delicately in distinguishing the two. Delicate 
also are the suggestions of the science of proportion in 
the chapter called "The Vaulted Book." 

" Beauty is given by the relation of parts — size by 
their comparison. The first secret in getting the im- 



26o JOHN RUSKIN 

pression of size in this cliapel [the Spanish chapel, 
Santa Maria Novella] is the ^wproportion between 
pillar and arch. . . . Another great but more subtle 
secret is in the zV^equality and immeasurability of the 
curved lines, and the hiding of the form by the colour." 

Sf Alark^s Rest has in part the character of a recanta- 
tion. As the Stones of Venice praised Titian, Tintoretto, 
and Giorgione, so St Mark's Rest turns with an impulse 
of recognition, of regret for time lost, and of ardent 
reparation and tenderness, to the work of Carpaccio. 
If it were not nearly a cruel irreverence to say so, it 
might be said that John Ruskin too, as well as Europe, 
had had his Renaissance — although his Renaissance 
was controlled, justified, and maintained in the dignity 
of incorruption, unlike the world's. This abundant 
Paradise of Tintoretto, these doges, this glory, what 
was it else, even though its warmth kept it clean as 
. living creatures are clean ? Warm in the colour of 
Titian, this Renaissance was warmer still in the heart 
of Ruskin, but Renaissance it was, for the date attests 
it ] while the great painters were at their splendid work, 
architecture and sculpture, sealed with the sign of the 
Renaissance, were going together fast to indignity and 
death. 

Ruskin, like Europe, had had his Primitive days, 
his trecento and his quattrocento, before the great 
hour when he had first seen Tintoretto in glory. The 
universal custom of change passed upon him too. 
Doubtless he never knew — for it is peculiar to genius 



GUIDE-LOOKS. 26 1 

not to know — how much his lot was the common lot, 
or how usual it is with men and women, as well as with 
mankind, to make the progress from a trecento to a 
cinquecento in due time. What befel him was, to him, 
unheard of, even though he was giving all his years to 
the study of a like movement in history, for he brought 
to every change his own incomparable freshness and the 
surprises of an authentic experience. He made his 
great discoveries with an enterprising spirit, and when 
he had taken his fill of his Renaissance he retraced his 
own eager and urgent footsteps, and sought the earlier 
of the Venetian painters (much earlier in spirit and a 
little earlier in time), and, far behind them, the mosaics 
of the Byzantine Greeks. It was not that he had not 
studied these in the past. The Stones of Venice proves 
with what admiration he had read that " Bible of 
Venice" — St Mark's — on his first visit to the city of 
" tremulous streets " ; but now, in a third phase of 
thought, he rediscovered all things, being greatly and 
freshly moved, and thinking, like the disciple in the 
Imitation^ all he had done, until then, to be nothing. 
The reading-lesson begins at the farthest side of St 
Mark's from the sea, at a panel set horizontally ■ — a 
sculpture of twelve sheep, a throne between six and six, 
a cross thereon, a circle, and within the circle " a little 
caprioling creature," the Lamb of God. This is true 
Greek work, the work of the teacher of the Venetian 
(as in another place we saw the Greek work that in- 
structed the Pisan), and Ruskin has done no more 



262 JOHN RUSKIN. 

important work in the history of art than this Hnking 
of the antique with the new. Is it perhaps Gibbon 
with his Fall of Rome that so darkens the air of 
some eight hundred years with a squalid dust-storm of 
demolition as to obscure our sight of the unquenched 
lights of the mind of man ? Ruskin joins day to 
human day again, as the days of nature and the sun 
followed one another undimmed. 

After the Byzantine panel, then, come the two sculp- 
tures that are the earliest real Venetian work found by 
Ruskin in his search amongst Venetian stones. These 
are no longer purely symbolical, no longer "a kind of 
stone-stitching or samplerwork, done with the innocence 
of a girl's heart," but ardently and laboriously sculptural; 
it is Venetian work of the early thirteenth century ; it is 
traceable through sixteen hundred years to the sculp- 
tors of the Parthenon ; and it is the first Venetian 
St George. 

This immortal symbol-story — story of Perseus before 
it was a story of a saint — Ruskin follows up to the 
heights of the great time of sculpture before the close 
of the fifteenth century. The house that bore this work 
of culmination has been destroyed since Ruskin led his 
traveller, with so much delight, to the study of its panel. 
Not so the Scuola of St Theodore, carrying the sculpture 
of the mid-seventeenth century with its Raphaelesque 
attitude and its drapery " supremely, exquisitely bad " ; 
nor that which bore the yet later decoration — the last 
of all done by Venice for herself and not for tourists : 



GUIDE-BOOKS. 263 

" the last imaginations of her polluted heart, before 
death." 

The chapter called Shadow on the Dial shows the 
moral history of Venice to be but an " intense abstract " 
of the history of every nation in Europe. And this 
history can be approached by a modern reader in the 
spirit " of our numerous cockney friends " who are sure 
that the fervour of Christian Venice " was merely such a 
cloak for her commercial appetite as modern church- 
going is for modern swindling " ; or else in a spirit of 
respect for a faith that was but " an exquisite dream of 
mortal childhood" (and this Ruskin calls the "theory 
of the splendid mendacity of Heaven and majestic 
somnambulism of man"); or, thirdly, in the modest 
and rational spirit that confesses men to be in all 
ages deceived by their own guilty passions, but not 
altogether deprived of the perception of the rays from a 
Divinity in nature revealed to such as desire " to see 
the day of the Son of man." In this spirit and with 
this desire does Ruskin begin again that history of 
Venetian art which he had told thirty years earlier ; 
begins it " struck, almost into silence, by wonder at my 
own pert little Protestant mind." He leaves, he says, 
the blunder of his youth standing in the Stones of Venice, 
like Dr Johnson repentant in Lichfield Market ; but the 
blunder seems to be no more than a neglect of St Mark 
himself and of his sepulture in the cathedral, with all 
that the possession of this national treasure — his body 
— imported to the Venetian heart. From the history 



264 John ruskin. 

briefly re-written I take this lovely phrase in description 
of the first, lowly, wooden Venice of the early centuries : 
Ruskin calls her "this amphibious city, this sea-dog of 
towns, looking with soft human eyes at you from the 
sand." When, in course of time, we come to the day 
of the press, Ruskin announces " printing, and the 
universal gabble of fools." We need to remember his 
former phrase of pity for peasants who have no books. 
There is a beautiful wayside page about the field that 
once spread wild-flowers to the sea-winds before every 
coloured church in Venice — before St Mark's itself. 
Ruskin himself had passed one of his happiest of all 
hours, looking out of a church upon a flowering field, 
in England. And here, also by the way, is a passage 
on the Gothic sense of life : — 

" The Northern spiral is always elastic. . . . The 
Greek spiral drifted like that of a whirlpool or whirl- 
wind. It is always an eddy or vortex — not a living rod 
like the point of a young fern." 

The remainder of the historical essay is a reading of the 
mosaic and sculpture of St Mark's — the codex of the 
religion of Venice. 

The " first supplement " has for title " The Shrine of 
the Slaves " (the Schinvoni), and is a guide to the 
principal works of Carpaccio, whom Ruskin calls " the 
wonderfullest of Venetian harlequins." Foremost is 
Carpaccio's St George — "you shall not find another 
piece quite the like of that little piece of work, for 
supreme, serene, unassuming, unfaltering sweetness of 



GUIDE-BOOKS. 265 

painter's perfect art," Ruskiu says of the first of these ; 
and further on he guides us through the series of the 
St Jerome paintings. Ruskin studied Luini at Milan 
alternately with Carpaccio at Venice, for love of Luini 
was another sign of Ruskin's reaction against his 
former Renaissance ; and the comparison of the two 
painters is one of the loveliest passages of Ruskin's 
work on the purer Italian art. 

That part of the Bible of Aniietis w^hich places the 
book in this chapter of Guide-books is no more than 
the after-part ; and the volume was originally intended 
to form one of the series bearing the general title On?- 
Fathers have told its, planned to present " local divisions 
of Christian history," and to gather, "towards their 
close, into united illustration of the power of the 
Church in the Thirteenth Century." The whole project 
was never fulfilled. 

The cathedral of Amiens stands in Ruskin's book as 
the representative work of the Franks in this north- 
western part of the country, and the centuries that 
prepared for the erection of such a sign as this — " the 
Parthenon of (Gothic architecture" — are told in a few 
chapters, with the avow-ed intention of showing the 
student the virtues, and not the crimes, of the remote 
past. In as much as it was not the crimes of the sons 
of the Frank and Goth that raised this cluster of 
flowered sculpture, doubtless Ruskin works duly to the 
purpose of his book. He shows us the few centuries 
(three after the birth of Christ) during which the people 



266 JOHN RUSKIN. 

of this region paid a belated homage to the gods of 
Rome, and the coming, preaching, and martyrdom of 
Saint Firmin in Httle Amiens, seated by her eleven 
streams, as, twelve hundred years later, the carvings of 
the cathedral were to record. A grave for the martyr 
in a garden, a little oratory over the grave — and here 
was erected the first bishopric on the soil of Gaul ; 
and when the Franks themselves came from the north, 
here was their first capital. Two legends are told in 
this sketch of history — ■ the story of St Martin and 
that of St Genevieve : St Martin, the Roman soldier, 
who in the thirty-first winter after the coming of St 
Firmin, when men were dying of the frost, cut his cloak 
in two with his sword, to cover a beggar ; St Martin, 
who was afterwards Bishop of Tours, and " an influence 
of unmixed good to all mankind, then and afterwards," 
and who took his episcopal vestment from his shoulders 
at a church ceremony, as he had rent his cloak, for gift 
to a beggar. Ruskin teaches us of what small moment 
it is whether these things came to pass in fact, and of 
what great moment that they were told. There is also 
the hobnobbing of the same St Martin, at table opposite 
to the Emperor of Germany, with the beggar behind his 
chair. 



" You are aware that in Royal feasts in those days 
persons of much inferior rank in society were allowed in 
the hall : got behind people's chairs, and saw and heard 
what was going on, while they unobtrusively picked up 
crumbs and licked trenchers." 



GUIDE-BOOKS. 267 

The legend of St Genevieve is of the wild fifth 
century. 

" Seven years old she was, when, on his way to 
England from Auxerre, Saint Germain passed a night in 
her village, and among the children who brought him 
on his way . . . noticed this one — wider-eyed in rever- 
ence than the rest ; drew her to him, questioned her, 
and was sweetly answered that she would fain be Christ's 
handmaid. And he hung round her neck a small 
copper coin, marked with a cross. . . . More than 
Nitocris was to Egypt, more than Semiramis to Nineveh, 
more than Zenobia to the city of palm-trees — this seven 
years old shepherd maiden became to Paris and her 
France." 

The description of the cathedral is to be followed by 
a reading of the stone sculptures, on the spot. But I 
must extract this, on the wood-work : — 

" Aisles and porches, lancet windows and roses, you 
can see elsewhere as well as here — but such carpenter's 
work you cannot. It is late, — fully-developed flam- 
boyant just past the fifteenth century — and has some 
Flemish stolidity mixed with the playing French fire of 
it. . . . Sweet and young -grained wood it is: oak 
trained and chosen for such work, sound now as four 
hundred years since. Under the carver's hand it seems 
to cut like clay, to fold like silk, to grow like living 
branches, to leap like living flame." 

The apse at Amiens, we learn, is the first thing done 
perfectly in its manner by Northern Christendom ; the 
best work here is the work of the only ten perfect years, 
so that from nave to transept — built no more than ten 



268 JOHN RUSKIN. 

years later — there is a little change, "not towards 
decline, but a not quite necessary precision." 

" Who built it, shall we ask ? God and Man, — is the 
first and most true answer. The stars in their courses 
built it, and the Nations. Greek Athena labours here 
— and Roman Father Jove, and Guardian Mars. The 
Gaul labours here, and the Frank ; knightly Norman, 
— mighty Ostrogoth, — and wasted anchorite of Idumea." 

In this place shall be extracted a page that the 
traveller should take with him to Lucca — the description 
of that tomb of Ilaria del Caretto, the work of Jacopo 
della Quercia, which, seen by Ruskin in his youth and 
often seen again, shared with a height of the Alps, a 
valley of the Jura, an allegory of Giotto, a myth of 
Pallas, the rule over Ruskin's life. The passage is in 
The Th?-ee Co/oii?-s of Pt-e-Raphaelitisin : — 

"This sculpture is central in every respect; being 
the last Florentine work in which the proper form of 
Etruscan tomb is preserved, and the first in which all 
right Christian sentiment respecting death is embodied. 
. . . This, as a central work, has all the peace of the 
Christian Eternity, but only in part its gladness. Young 
children wreath round the tomb a garland of abundant 
flowers, but she herself, Ilaria, yet sleeps ; the time is 
not yet come for her to be awakened out of sleep. Her 
image is a simple portrait of her — how much less 
beautiful than she was in life we cannot know — but as 
beautiful as marble can be. And through and in the 
marble we may see that the damsel is not dead, but 
sleepeth : yet as visibly a sleep that shall know no ending 
until the last day break, and the last shadow flee away ; 
until then, she shall not return. Her hands are laid on 



GUIDE-BOOKS. 269 

her breast — not praying — she has no need to pray now. 
She wears her dress of every day, clasped at her throat, 
girdled at her waist, the hem of it drooping over her 
feet. No disturbance of its folds by pain or sickness, 
no binding, no shrouding of her sweet form, in death 
more than in life. As a soft, low wave of summer sea, 
her breast rises ; no more : the rippled gathering of its 
close mantle droops to her belt, then sweeps to her feet, 
straight as drifting snow. And at her feet her dog lies 
watching her ; the mystery of his mortal life joined, by 
love, to her immortal one. Few know, and fewer love, 
the tomb and its place — not shrine, for it stands bare by 
the cathedral wall. . . . But no goddess statue of the 
Greek cities, no nun's image among the cloisters of 
Apennine, no fancied light of angel in the homes of 
heaven, has more divine rank among the thoughts of 
men." 



2/0 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

TORS CLAVIGERA' (1S71-1SS4). 

This collection of papers being in part biographical, I 
have placed it somewhat out of its chronological turn, 
so as immediately to precede Prceterita in closing the 
volume. 

The name is explained by Ruskin at the outset. 
Fors Clavigera is the fate or fortune that bears a club, a 
key, a nail, signifying the deed of Hercules, the patience 
of Ulysses, the law of Lycurgus. 

Of the seven years' volumes of the first series I cannot 
hope to make even the all-imperfect indication (exposi- 
tion it can hardly be called) — the little popular guide — 
that I have attempted in the case of the other works of 
capital importance. The running theme of this book is 
too various, too allusive ; it is not a book as the others 
are books. Unity of purpose it has, but it has the 
form of letters — Letters to the Workmen and Labourers 
of Great Britain — written according to the suggestion 
of the changing day. The initial motive is the redress 
of social misery — miseria as the Italians call it par 



'FORS CLAVIGERA.' 2/1 

excellence — that is, the poverty of classes, the poverty of 
millions, indiscriminate poverty : not the misery which 
is either deserved or undeserved, or wherefrom this or 
that man can rise by using the shoulders of those who 
cannot, but the massive poverty, the collective. 

" For my own part [says the first letter] I will put up 
with this state of things not an hour longer. I am not 
an unselfish person, nor an Evangelical one ; I have no 
particular pleasure in doing good ; neither do I dislike 
doing it so much as to expect to be rewarded for it in 
another world. But I simply cannot paint, nor read, 
nor look at minerals, nor do anything else that I like, 
. . . because of the misery that I know of, and see signs 
of where I know it not, which no imagination can inter- 
pret too bitterly." 

The help Ruskin proposes is, to show the causes, to 
teach a remedy ; meanwhile to set aside the greater part 
of his own wealth for the succour of misery in detail, 
and to set members of St George's Guild over the acre- 
ages of the poverty of cities. Having found himself 
rich, Ruskin " piously and prudently began to grow poor 
again," for the sake of the poor, giving one-tenth of his 
fortune, for instance, for the buying of land for them. 
He began to be poor. It would be a mockery to say 
more of a man living, as he said, " between a Turkey 
carpet and a Titian," however laborious were his days. 
In many places he complains of the luxury of his boy- 
hood, which made the practice of poverty more than he 
could attempt. He had always been generous ; giving 
annuities with both hands — the case of Miss Siddal in 



2/2 JOHN RUSKIN. 

htr delicate health has been made pubUc ; but he re- 
proached himself that he had not the courage to live in 
a garret or make shoes like Tolstoi (whom he had not 
read, but heard of with sympathetic envy) ; but, after 
the self-spoliation of his patrimony, he had a great 
income from his books. St George's Guild, the mem- 
bers whereof gave also a tithe of their revenues, was to 
do the human work of keeping the garden and dressing 
it, fostering fish in the waters, and flocks and herds on 
the grass. John Ruskin with his own hand tried to 
tend a Surrey stream (at Carshalton) and tried to keep a 
little piece of pavement clean in a London back street, 
and his undergraduates mended the famous road near 
Oxford. The Guild was to succour childhood and 
educate it. Education w^as one of his chief of all pro- 
jects. The John Ruskin school at Camberwell, and 
Whitelands College at Chelsea, amongst others, keep 
the memory of his generosity and his sympathy. As 
the Guild was also to see that the poor were not fined 
for their poverty, he himself set up a shop in Paddington 
Street, served by his own servants, to sell tea in small 
quantities without the usual disproportionate profit 
on the subdivision. But for lack of expenditure on 
glass, brass, signs, and general advertising, the people 
were slow to buy at his shop. He would not reconcile 
himself to the fact (made hideous by exaggeration in 
every street) that a thing must be made known in a 
stupid world. He had seen it written by "a first-rate 
man of business " that " a bad thing will pay, if you put 



'PORS CLAVIGERA.' 2/3 

it properly before the public." What are the final 
results of putting bad things " properly " before the 
public he perceived, although neither the first-rate man 
of business nor the public seemed to do so much. 
In regard to the spoliation of the poor and foolish by 
more direct means than the proportional increase of 
profit on small sales, or the profit generally made neces- 
sary by plate glass and gilt letters, John Bright had said, 
about that time, that false weights and measures were 
not so frequent, nor was adulteration, as some philan- 
thropists thought, and that therefore legislation had 
better let the matter alone; moreover, that "life would 
not be worth living if one's weights and measures were 
liable to inspection " ; or so Ruskin reports that depre- 
cation of " interference " which was the pestilence of 
home affairs in those now distant days. Ruskin thought 
so much inquisition ought to be tolerable. So does 
all England think to-day. He also thought that the 
poor ought not to be deprived of food for fear (on 
the part of tradesmen) that " prices would go down." 
He had seen fish sent back to the coast from a London 
market for this cause. So, too, one year when the sun 
had given a great harvest of plums, a London fruit- 
seller refused to sell plums, for he said, with emotion, 
it would be a pity to sell them for less than so much a 
pound. He had a real respect for the plums. Mean- 
while the poor streets were full of children who could 
buy neither fish nor plums at the artificial prices. 
With these matters the farms of the Guild were to deal 

s 



2/4 JOHN RUSKIN. 

as well as they might. The rents of St George's lands 
were to be lowered, not raised, in proportion to improve- 
ments made by the tenant, and were to be returned to 
the land entirely in the form of better culture — not 
necessarily returned to the piece of land that produced 
them, but applied there or elsewhere. The tenants of 
St George would have no more right to ask what was 
done with their fair rents than the tenants of another 
landlord have to ask about his race - horses. The 
financial work of the Company was to be (largely stated) 
the endowment, instead of the robbery by National 
Debt, of children's children ; and endowment, not taxa- 
tion, of the poor. For the construction of the Society ; 
for its system of museums ; for its admirable plan of 
discouraging the "arts," and especially the art of fiction ; 
for the laws of its public and commercial economy 
(entirely gathered from, and tested by, English, Floren- 
tine, and Venetian history, and obeyed, with no acknow- 
ledgment to Ruskin, by the practice of the magistrates 
of our own day) ; for the vast scheme and its details, 
in a word, the reader must consult those parts of the 
seven years' letters that deal with it. Of himself as 
Master, Ruskin wrote : — 

"What am I myself then, infirm and old, who take or 
claim leadership . . . ? God forbid that I should claim 
it ; it is thrust and compelled upon me — utterly against 
my will, utterly to my distress, utterly, in many things, 
to my shame ! . . . Such as I am, to my own amaze- 
ment, I stand — so far as I can discern— -alone in con- 
viction, in hope, and in resolution, in the wilderness of 



*FORS CLAVIGERA,' 275 

this modern world. Bred in luxury, which I perceive to 
have been unjust to others, and destructive to myself; 
vacillating, foolish, and miserably failing in all my own 
conduct in life — and blown about hopelessly by storms 
of passion — I, a man clothed in soft raiment, — I, a 
reed shaken with the wind — ! " 

To this passion of grief how shall any one desire that 
consolation had been brought ? Not for passion, but 
for the lack of it, he reminds us, are men condemned — 
" because they had no pity." To wish him less mercy, 
to wish, with the vain wish of retrospection, that Ruskin 
had found some solace in the midst of the martyrdom 
of his convictions, is forbidden us. 

Let this be borne in mind by those who care anything 
for the attempt — the conception, the project, and the 
failure of the Company : it was not intended to be a 
curative measure : it was not to cure drunkenness or to 
give alms, but to change the motive and action of the 
responsible social world. 

The knotty parts of Political Economy must remain 
knotty for ordinary minds. Ruskin thinks his way 
through them as though they were easy to him. In 
reading Mill, on the other hand, you find him making 
his way with difficulty. The mere reader may choose 
his teachers, but has the right to ask that they shall 
speak to him in pure and exact English. This Ruskin 
does and Mill does not. There is nothing left, worth 
saying, of some of Mill's famous definitions after Ruskin 
has translated them. Those who call Ruskin's system 
" sentimental " (intending to insult it) and think they 



276 JOHN RUSKIN. 

have clone enough, cannot have so much as set out upon 
the road of his argument. It is true that he here and 
there digresses, as, for instance, to tell us that ministers 
of religion had been so loud against almsgiving one 
winter that when he wanted to give a penny he first 
looked up and down the street to see if a clergyman 
were coming. But the mental work, when it is in 
progress, is close. His quarrel with the science of 
Political Economy, as it is taught by its popular pro- 
fessors, is that it is not scientific enough, as his quarrel 
with the science of some geologists and of some botan- 
ists is to the same purpose. Although Ruskin says 
nothing to show that he recognises the identity, he holds 
much in common with Mill — for example, the national 
loss that is the price of luxury : Ruskin, however, shows 
the mischief as well as the loss. But he is alone in 
stating England to be a poor nation. Beside Mill's 
cautious chapters on Loans Ruskin places this : — 

" There is nothing really more monstrous in any 
recorded savagery . . . than that governments should 
be able to get money for any folly they choose to 
commit by selling to capitalists the right of taxing future 
generations to the end of time. All the cruellest wars in- 
flicted, all the basest luxuries grasped by the idle classes, 
are thus paid for by the poor a hundred times over." 

Let me also extract this, which the reader will replace 
in the chain of argument : — 

" Those nations which exchange mechanical or artistic 
productions for food are servile, and necessarily in pro- 
cess of time will be ruined." 



'FORS CLAVIGERA.' 277 

And in the pages on commercial economy, the reader 
will probably find that Fawcett merits Ruskin's con- 
temptuous correction where he states the " interest of 
money" to consist of three parts, and the first to be 
" Reward for Abstinence." Abstinence, as Ruskin 
shows us, will not make the uneaten cake any the larger 
after it has lain by, postponed, for a year or ten. 

It is less from the incompressible main argument than 
from the by-ways of the letters on Economy that the 
present pages shall be illustrated. For instance, Ruskin 
commends a communism in all things, even joys : 
"There is in this world infinitely more joy than pain 
to be shared, if you will only take your share " ; such a 
partaking of joys not at first ours being the perfection 
of charity, and strangely enough, though a happy task, 
more difficult than many a sad one. This is from one 
of those digressions on education which grow more and 
more frequent in the volumes o( Fors : — 

"You little know ... by what constancy of law the 
power of highest discipline and honour is vested by 
Nature in the two chivalries — of the Horse and the 
Wave." 

Of his own early travels by carriage with his father in 
England he says that as soon as he could perceive any 
political truth at all, he perceived that it was probably 
much happier to live in a small house, "and have 
Warwick Castle to be astonished at, than to live in 
Warwick Castle and have nothing to be astonished at." 



2/8 JOHN RUSKIN. 

This sums up, to one who will think of it, much of the 
teaching of Ruskin on national economy : — • 

" That rain and frost of heaven ; and the earth which 
they loose and bind ; these, and the labour of your 
hands to divide them, and subdue, are your wealth for 
ever. . . . You can diminish it, but cannot increase ; 
that your barns should be filled with plenty — your 
presses burst with new wine — is your blessing ; and 
every year — when it is full — it must be new ; and, every 
year, no more. This money, which you think so multi- 
pliable, is only to be increased in the hands of some, by 
the loss of others. The sum of it, in the end, repre- 
sents, and can represent, only what is in the barn and 
winepress.'' 

Not all the letters are full of this matter. Some of 
them are written from Pisa, Rome, Lucca, or Verona ; 
some are historical studies ; one has a quiet and lovely 
page on the cultivated lands under Carrara. 

"On each side of the great plain is a wilderness of 
hills, veiled at their feet with a grey cloud of olive- 
woods ; above, sweet with glades of chestnut ; peaks of 
more distant blue, still, to-day, embroidered with snow, 
are rather to be thought of as vast precious stones than 
mountains, for all the state of the world's palaces has 
been hewn out of their marble." 

From Verona Ruskin writes of the breaking of a 
thunder-shower over the city, at the outer gates of the 
Alpine valleys, and the slipping into the Lombard rivers 
of a million of sudden streams. Why did not the 
Italians gather the water for their towns ? Some men 
were standing idle in the piazze (machines doing such 
work as there was in their stead), others were employed 



'FORS CLAVIGERA.* 279 

to " dash to pieces " the Gothic of Tuscany and Lom- 
bardy, and others to stick bills bearing " Rome or 
death " upon the ancient walls of Venice, but there was 
no time nor money for saving the subalpine valleys from 
flood. At the same time Ruskin gives a simple lesson 
to engineers on the making of reservoirs, and to writers 
(Charles Reade is evidently aimed at) on the description 
of them. They should be wide, not deep ; the gate of 
a dry dock can keep out the Atlantic, to the necessary 
depth in feet and inches—" the depth giving the pres- 
sure, not the superficies." Thence he passes, like 
Napoleon after making roads, but to better purpose, to 
the education of girls ; and describes with an exquisite- 
ness that at once quickens and guards the sweet and 
humorous and modest phrases, Carpaccio's painting of 
the young princess. It is hard upon two American 
girls, whom Ruskin saw travelling from Venice to 
Verona with the blinds of the railway carriage closed, 
to rebuke them by the contrast of their mind and 
manners with St Ursula's. Incidentally Ruskin quotes 
much from Marmontel, a writer of the late eighteenth 
century to whom he claims a kind of resemblance of 
sympathy, but whom the reader is free to think he 
honours over much. 

The twenty-fourth letter, which is the first dated from 
Corpus Christi College, is the last which begins " My 
Friends " : not one of the workmen he addressed had 
sent him a friendly word in answer. " Nor shall I sign 
myself ' faithfully yours ' any more ; being very far from 



28o JOHN RUSKIN. 

faithfully my own, and having found most other people 
anything but faithfully mine." To the other money- 
troubles expressed in this and other works of about this 
time begin to be added those doubts as to the lawful- 
ness of taking interest which Ruskin discusses with a 
correspondent. The coin itself is the subject of one 
letter, which has a fine lesson on the florin, and a gay 
one on the sovereign (the sovereign of 1872, and what 
have we not come to since then?): — 

" As a design — how brightly comic it is ! The horse 
looking abstractedly into the air, instead of where pre- 
cisely it would have looked, at the beast between its 
legs : St George, with nothing but his helmet on (being 
the last piece of armour he is likely to want), putting his 
naked feet, at least his feet showing their toes through 
the buskins, well forward, that the dragon may with the 
greatest convenience get a bite at them ; and about to 
deliver a mortal blow at him with a sword which cannot 
reach him by a couple of yards, — or, I think, in George 
III.'s piece, with a field-marshal's truncheon. Victor 
Carpaccio had other opinions on the likelihood of 
matters in this battle. His St George exactly reverses 
the practice of ours. He rides armed, from shoulder to 
heel, in proof — but without his helmet. For the real 
difficulty in dragon-fights ... is not so much to kill 
your dragon as to see him ; at least to see him in time, it 
being too probable that he will see you first. Carpaccio's 
St George will have his eyes about him, and his head 
free to turn freely. . . . He meets his dragon at the 
gallop, catches him in the mouth with his lance. . . . 
But Victor Carpaccio had seen knights tilting ; and 
poor Pistrucci . . . had only seen them presenting ad- 
dresses as my Lord Mayor, and killing turtle instead 
of dragons." 



'FORS CLAVIGERA.' 28 1 

What a perceptive and penetrative imagination as to 
any encounter with dragons that may befall — not Car- 
paccio's imagination only, but Ruskin's ! How much 
dramatic possession of the matter ! And what sense 
of dragons ! Emerson had been the only man who 
believed Ruskin's story of Turner — that he had 
darkened his own picture lest it should take the light 
out of Lawrence's ; yet Emerson joined those who 
rejoice in discrediting, when he took some less than 
noble pleasure in exposing St George as a fraudulent 
bacon -factor who was lynched, not martyred, and de- 
served it. Strange subject for triumph or scorn ! If St 
George had been honoured for his fraud, like an 
American millionaire, the laugh, such as it is, might 
have been against his votaries ; but seeing that he was 
honoured for his honour (whether by error or not), how 
thin and unintelligent is the malice of the jest ! Need- 
less to say, however, the St George believed to have 
been martyred under Diocletian was not the George of 
the bacon contract, later a heretic bishop, and lynched. 
The symbol of the dragon did not for some ages enter 
into the story of the canonised St George. On this 
subject it is that Ruskin speaks his only reverent word 
(or nearly the only one) of a German author, calling 
Goethe " the wise German." 

In the prelude to the study of Scott which fills 
some part of Fors is this passage on some of the 
results of the work of "talc-tellers," those who had 
dynasties : — 



2S2 JOHN RUSKIN. 

" Miss Edgeworth made her morality so impertinent 
that, since her time, it has only been with fear and 
trembling that any good novelist has ventured to show 
the slightest bias in favour of the ten commandments. 
Scott made his romance so ridiculous that since his day 
one can't help fancying helmets were always paste-board, 
and horses were always hobby. Dickens made every- 
body laugh or cry, so that they could not go about their 
business till they had got their faces in wrinkles ; and 
Thackeray settled like a meat-fly on whatever one had 
got for dinner, and made one sick of it." 

It is from Fors Clavigera that we first learn the story 
of John Ruskin's childhood, severely governed in the 
strange sense of the " Evangelical " sect of that time — 
that children should be deprived by compulsion of what 
their elders amply permitted themselves, should see self- 
indulgence at table in those they were taught to respect, 
but should be allowed no dainties for themselves. A 
fasting father and mother setting the example one can 
understand, but not this mute promise of a groaning 
board in the future, when father and mother should 
be dead. Ruskin acquiesces, more or less, in the disci- 
pline. It was Dickens who made things more equit- 
able ; but the equity was established in indulgence, not 
in fasting. Precious are the fragments of biography as 
the letters go on, and most mournful, as : " My father 
and mother and nurse are dead, and the woman I hoped 
would have been my wife is dying." We find him 
remembering amid the golden -lighted whitewash of a 
poor room at Assisi (he not only studied Giotto and the 
^ovcrello St Francis there, but maintained a Friar) the 



'FORS CLAVIGERA.' 283 

poor room of his aunt at Croydon ; at Notre Dame 
gleaning the remnants of old work among the fine fresh 
restorations, having it cast, and drawing it ; on the Pincio 
with his arm about the neck oia.frate who wished to kiss 
his hand. We find him (by a memory of what had 
happened in 1858) at Turin, overwhelmed by a sense of 
the " God-given power " of Veronese, and listening in a 
Waldensian chapel to " a little squeaking idiot," with a 
congregation of " seventeen old women and three louts." 
Their preacher told them they were the only " people of 
God" in Turin. It had been the turning-point of 
twenty years of thought to John Ruskin, and more than 
twenty years " in much darkness and sorrow " followed 
it, but during this sermon he had renounced the sect of 
his youth. 

Ruskin's diction is noble in vigour and high in vitality 
in this work of impassioned intellect, I^ors Clavigera. 
Not here does he force with difficulty the tired and 
inelastic common speech to explain his untired mind, as 
in some pages of Modern Painters ; not here are per- 
orations of eloquence over-rich ; not here constructions 
after Hooker, nor signs of Gibbon. All the diction is 
fused in the fiery life, and the lesser beauties of elo- 
quence are far transcended. During the publication of 
these letters the world told him, now that he could 
express himself but could not think, and now that he 
was effeminate. But he was giving to that world the 
words of a martyr of thought, and the martyr was a man. 



284 



CHAPTER XXVII. 

'PR^TERITA' (1SS5-1S89). 

The limits of a brief expository essay debar me from 
giving so much as an outline of small out-lying books, 
early pamphlets and articles, and later lectures, public 
letters, ai-.d such minor incidental work as the notes on 
the Royal Academy of six years; the notes on the 
Turner drawings ; the ten conversation-lectures to little 
school-girls on the elements of crystallisation, published 
under the title Ethics of the Dust (1866) ; The Lazvs of 
Fesole (1877-1878); The Pleasures of Eji gland (1885), 
which were the last of the Slade lectures ; Hortus Jn- 
clusus (18 74- 1 88 7) — the letters to Miss Beever and 
her sister, who collected the volume Frondes Agrestes 
from Modern Painters ; the studies of the architecture 
of the Cistercian Order ; and the re-published volume 
of early poetry. Arroius of the Chace and On the Old 
Road contain respectively the public letters and the 
magazine papers, collected. There remains, therefore, 
only the book of autobiography, the last page whereof 
was the last written by Ruskin for the world. 



'PR.^TERirA.' 285 

The friendship with Turner in Ruskin's youth is pre- 
sented to us as a relation warm and equal in the elder 
generation ; but as to himself Ruskin records little but 
slight discouragement from the painter he loved. Turner 
seems to have been principally anxious that the young 
author should give his parents no anxiety on his travels : 
" They will be in such a fidge about you," we find 
Turner snying dubiously on his own doorstep when 
Ruskin was to travel alone. " It used to be, to my 
father, ' yours most truly,' and to me ' yours truly.' " 
Ruskin's first defence of the old man (it was against a 
criticism in Blackivood''s Magazine, in 1836, and Ruskin 
was seventeen) is acknowledged with thanks but with- 
out praise, and Turner adds, " I never move in these 
matters." We read of Ruskin's own study of drawing. 
He learnt, whilst yet in his teens, of Copley Fielding, 

" to wash colour smoothly in successive tints, to shade 
cobalt through pink madder into yellow ochre for skies, 
to use a broken scraggy touch for the tops of mountains, 
to represent calm lakes by broad strips of shade with 
lines of light between them, ... to produce dark clouds 
and rain with twelve or t\venty successive washes, and to 
crumble burnt umber with a dry brush for foliage and 
foreground." 

But this was a pupil w^ho was discovering a manner of 
measuring the degrees of blue in the sky, and who was 
acquiring the only true temper of solitude — unlike, he 
found later, to Carlyle's : — 

" That the rest of the world wvis waste to him unless 
he had admirers in it, is a sorry slate of sentiment 



286 JOHN RUSKIN. 

enough. . . . My entire delight was in observing with- 
out being myself noticed. ... I was absolutely interested 
in men and their ways, as I was interested in marmots 
and chamois, in tomtits and trout. If only they would 
stay still and let me look at them, and not get into their 
holes and up their heights." 

The most moving passage in the first volume shows 
the opening to Ruskin of the " Gates of the Hills," on 
his "impassioned petition" to his parents that the way 
of travel might, for the first time, lie towards the Alps — 

" Gates of the Hills ; opening for me to a new life — 
to cease no more, except at the Gates of the Hills whence 
one returns not." 

It is from the slight record of the books taken into 
the travelling-carriage that I quote this magnificent image 
of the great balance of Johnson's style : — 

" I valued his sentences not primarily because they 
were symmetrical, but because they were just, and clear ; 
... it is a method of judgment rarely used by the average 
public, who . . . are as ready with their applause for a 
sentence of Macaulay's, which may have no more sense 
in it than a blot pinched between doubled paper, as to 
reject one of Johnson's, . . . though its symmetry be as 
of thunder atiswering from two horizons.^'' 

We find Ruskin, " of age," making drawings rather in 
imitation of Turner, and "out of his own head," than in 
the copying of Copley Fielding,— drawings with rocks, 
castles, and balustrades. He was aware, throughout his 
life, of his lack of inventive imagination. " I can no 
more write a story than compose a picture," he says 



'PR^TERITA.' 287 

in reference to his story for children, The King of the 
Golden River. It was a bit of ivy round a thorn stem 
that first drew his eyes to the hfe of things, and next he 
studied an aspen-tree against the sky on a road through 
Fontainebleau ; in a later page he avows that his draw- 
ings of Venetian stones were " living and like." And 
with these traces of travel are the records of Beauvais, 
Bourges, Chartres, Rouen, a magnificent chapter on 
Geneva and the Rhone, and on his discovery of the 
Campo Santo at Pisa, and of Lucca, to be beloved 
for the rest of life. Here was the tomb of Ilaria del 
Caretto, and 

" Here in Lucca I found myself suddenly in the pres- 
ence of twelfth century buildings, originally set in such 
balance of masonry that they could all stand without 
mortar ; and in material so incorruptible, that after six 
hundred years of sunshine and rain, a lancet could not 
now be put between their joints." 

In the Pisan cemetery Ruskin drew, seated on a 
scaffold level with the frescoes. 

"I, . . . being by this time practised in delicate 
curves, by having drawn trees and grass rightly, got far 
better results than I had hoped, and had an extremely 
happy fortnight of it. For as the triumph of Death 
was no new thought to me, the life of hermits was no 
temptation." 

At Florence he made friends with the Friars at Fiesole 
(he insists upon "Fesole," with an acute accent that has 
no existence in the Italian language), for the Friars had 



288 JOHN RUSKIN. 

not yet been expelled by law, and there remained some 
living ancient stones in Italy, later destroyed, or restored, 
or dead, dark, and dull within museums. His principal 
work was at Santa Maria Novella and San Marco, and 
his master, Fra Angelico — " Lippi and Botticelli being 
still far beyond me." 

Why did Ruskin never go to Spain ? He owns that 
he admires in himself the " simplicity of affection " that 
kept him in love year by year with Calais sands, and the 
narcissus meadows of Vevay, and the tomb at Lucca, 
whereas he heard even more than the customary praises 
(through his father's wine-making relations) of the sierras 
and of the architecture. It seems that he decided, on 
the evidence of "the absolutely careful and faithful work 
of David Roberts," that Spanish and Arab buildings 
were merely luxurious in ornament, and inconstructive 
in character. He went no further ; and had, besides, 
more than enough on the ways of study that knew his 
feet. It is in allusion to Spain, however, that in this 
second volume of PnEterita we find the first signs of his 
vigilance in other things than the leaves of nature or the 
arts of man. It is in the chapter called " The Feasts of 
the Vandals," which names the guests received in the 
Ruskins' house. Amongst them were the daughters of 
the wine -selling partner, M. Domecq, in those days 
married. 

" Elise, Comtesse des Roys, and Caroline, Princesse 
Bethune, came with their husbands . . . partly to see 
London, partly to discuss with my father his manage- 



'PR^TERITA.' 289 

ment of the English market : and the way in which 
these lords, virtually, of lands both in France and Spain, 
though men of sense and honour ; and their wives, 
though women of gentle and amiable disposition, . . . 
spoke of their Spanish labourers and French tenantry, 
with no idea whatever respecting them but that, except 
as producers by their labour of money to be spent in 
Paris, they were cumberers of the ground, gave me the 
first clue to the real sources of wrong in the social laws 
of modern Europe. ... It was already beginning to be, 
if not a question, at least a marvel with me, that these 
graceful and gay Andalusians, who played guitars, danced 
boleros, and fought bulls, should virtually get no good 
of their beautiful country but the bunch of grapes or 
stalk of garlic they frugally dined on ; that its precious 
wine was not for them, still less the money it was sold 
for ; but the one came to crown our Vandalic feasts, and 
the other furnished our . . . walls with pictures, our 
. . . gardens with milk and honey, and five noble houses 
in Paris with the means of beautiful dominance in its 
Elysian fields." 

Ruskin's friendship with Dr John Brown, a friend of 
his father's race and native town, and therefore, he says, 
best of friends for him, is conspicuous in the second 
volume. Of the long friendship with Carlyle there is 
little trace, and that little a report not of Ruskin's but 
of Carlyle's youth. Margaret was the daughter of the 
schoolmaster who gave to Carlyle his first valid lessons 
in Latin. She lived to be twenty-seven. Carlyle told 
Ruskin, "The last time that I wept aloud in the world, 
I think was at her death." 

During the journeys told in the earlier pages of this 
volume, Ruskin was meditating the second volume of 

T 



290 JOHN RUSKIN. 

Modern Paititers. Sydney Smith was amongst the most 
eagerly expectant. Ruskin says : — 

" All the main principles of metaphysics asserted in 
the opening of Modern Painters had been, with con- 
clusive decision and simplicity, laid down by Sydney 
himself in the lectures he gave on Moral Philosophy at 
the Royal Institution in the years 1804-5-6, of which he 
had never himself recognised the importance." 

The reader may remember, I will add, that Sydney 
Smith was slightly contemned as a sentimentalist for his 
advocacy of the cause of " climbing boys." At any rate, 
those readers who care for children and for the English 
language may have in their minds the phrases whereby, 
in the course of his plea for legislation in that matter, 
he rebuked the world of his day for its profligate 
mdifference. 

To the signature " Kataphusin," used in the earliest 
of Ruskin's essays, had followed that of " A Graduate 
of Oxford," and the work so signed was looked for, 
as Ruskin himself says, " by more people than my 
father and mother " ; but Sydney Smith was the earliest 
admirer in high places. Ruskin's fame was already old, 
and he still young, when on the Lake of Geneva he met 
his American reader, Charles Eliot Norton — " my second 
friend after Dr John Brown : . . . my first real tutor." 
This friend was of his own age, but a greater reader, 
Ruskin found, and a better scholar. In 1888, writing 
PrcEterita at Sallenches, he says in regard to this 
friendship : — 



'PR^TERITA.' 291 

" I can see them at this moment, those mountain 
meadows, if I rise from my writing-table . . . ; yes, and 
there is the very path we chmbed together, apparently 
unchanged. But on what seemed then the everlasting 
hills, beyond which the dawn rose cloudless, and on the 
heaven in which it rose, and on all that we that day 
knew, of human mind and virtue — how great the change, 
and sorrowful, I cannot measure." 

There is a great deal, in these last of all volumes, 
about preachers to whose sermons Ruskin listened in 
his youth, and about monks and friars whom he then 
visited abroad. And in this connection I must extract a 
charming passage from one of the letters, of thirty years 
later, to Miss Beever, from Assisi : — 

" The Sacristan gives me my coffee for lunch in his 
own little cell, looking out on the olive woods ; . . . and 
then perhaps we go into the sacristy and have a reverent 
little poke-out of relics. . . . Things that are only shown 
twice in the year or so, with fumigation ! all the congre- 
gation on their knees — and the sacristan and I having a 
great heap of them on the table at once, like a dinner- 
service ! " 

But he lived to see another kind of Italy. He hoped 
never again to hear the summer evening noises of an 
Italian town as they appalled his indignant ears in one 
of his last Italian summers — a summer of the long fore- 
told and long desired days of political unity. Tearings 
to pieces and restorations he was compelled to see under 
the various political conditions of half a century. More 
inevitable things than these, in all countries, displeased 
him ; howbeit he resigned himself, many years after the 



292 JOHN RUSKIN. 

invention of railways, to main lines. It was the by-ways 
of the rail that he thought unnecessary and unnecessarily 
destructive. 

"There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bake- 
well, divine as the vale of Tempe ; you might have seen 
the gods there morning and evening — Apollo and all the 
sweet Muses of the Light. You enterprised a railroad, 
. . . you blasted its rocks away, . . . and now every 
fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half an hour, and 
every fool in Bakewell at Buxton." 

The last phrase of the last volume (1889) closes a 
remembrance of Fonte Branda, the waters Dante 
remembered in the streamless place. With Charles 
Norton Ruskin had drunk of those sweet waters under 
the arches that hooded the head of Dante ; and, as it 
chances, these last of all words composed by Ruskin 
end, in Dante's way, with " the stars." " Mixed with 
the lightning," he says of the fireflies of one of those 
Italian summer nights, "and more intense than the 
stars." After this he wrote no more. But the last 
extract here shall be from the notes on a Turner 
exhibition in 1878, written just before the gravest 
illness of his life : — 

" Oh that some one had told me in my youth, when 
all my heart seemed to be set on these colours and 
clouds that appear for a little while and then vanish 
away, how little my love of them would serve me when 
the silence of lawn and wood in the dews of morning 
should be completed ; and all my thoughts should be of 
those whom, by neither, I was to meet more ! " 



CHRONOLOGY. 



The kindness of Mr Ruskin's friend and mine, Mr S. C. 
Cockerell, gives me the advantage of borrowing, with some 
slight abbreviations, his excellent biographical Chronology. 

1819.— Feb. 8. John Ruskia born ; 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick 

Square. 
1S22.— To Perth. Portrait by Northcote. 
1S23.— Summer tour in S.W. of England. Removed to 28 Heme 

Hill. 
1824.— To the Lakes, Keswick, Perth. 
1825.— To Paris, Brussels, Waterloo. 
1826.— Wrote first poem " The Needless Alarm." Summer tour to 

the Lakes and Perth. Began Latin. 
1S27. — Summer at Perth. 
1828.— Summer in West of England. His cousin Mary Richardson 

adopted by his parents. 
1S29. — Summer in Kent. 
1S30.— Tour to the Lakes. Began Greek. Copied Cruikshank. ^ 

1 83 1. First drawing lessons from Runciman. Summer tour in 

Wales. Began mathematics. 
1832. — Summer tour in Kent 
1833.— First Turner study in Rogers' Italy. Tour to the Rhine 

and Switzerland. Copied Rembrandt. Went to day-school. 
1834.— First study of Alpine geology. First published writings. 

Summer tour in West of England. 
1835.— Tour to Switzerland and Italy. First published poems. 



294 JOHN RUSKIN. 

1836. — Visit of the Domecqs. Drawing - lessons from Copley 

Fielding. Wrote Defence of Turjier. Tour to the South 

Coast after matriculating at Christ Church. 
1S37. — Went into residence at Oxford. Summer tour to the Lakes 

and Yorkshire. Began Poet}y of Ajxhitediire, and The Con- 
vergence of Perpendictdars. 
1838. — Wrote essay, Comparative Advantages of Music and Paint- 

ittg. Tour to the Lakes. 
1839. — Recited Newdigate prize poem at Commemoration. Tour 

to Cheddar, Devon, and Cornwall. Read with Osborne 

Gordon. 
1840. — Threatened with consumption. By Loire and Riviera to 

Rome. 
1841. — At Naples, Bologna, Venice, Basle. Under treatment at 

Leamington. Drawing-lessons from Harding. 
1842. — Passed final examination, and took B.A. degree. Saw 

Turner's Swiss sketches. Study of ivy from nature. Tour to 

France and Switzerland. Wrote Modem Painters, vol. i. 
1843. — Removed from Heme Hill to Denmark Hill. Took M.A. 

degree. 
1844. — Tour in Switzerland. Studied Old Masters at the 

Louvre. 
1845. — First tour alone. To Pisa. Study of Christian art at Lucca 

and Florence. To Verona. Study of Tintoretto at Venice. 

Wrote Modem Painters, vol. ii. 
1846. — Through France and the Jura to Geneva, Mont Cenis, and 

Italy. 
1847. — Tour in Scotland. 
1848. — Married at Perth. Attempted pilgrimage to English 

cathedrals. To Amiens, Paris, and Normandy. Seven Lamps, 

at 31 Park Street. 
1849. — Tour through Switzerland. Winter at Venice. 
1850. — Studied architecture and missals at Venice. Stones of 

Venice, vol. i., at Park Street. 
1851. — Notes on Sheepfolds. Acquaintance with Carlyle and 

Maurice. Defence of the Pre - Raphaelites. Tour through 

France and Switzerland. Winter and following spring at 

Venice. (Dec. 19. Turner died.) 
1852. — Stones of Venice, vols. ii. and iii. 
1853.— With Dr Acland and Millais at Glenfinlas. Lectures, 

Architecture and Paititing, at Edinburgh. 



CHRONOLOGY. 295 

1854. — With parents in Switzerland. Drawing. Working Men's 
College inaugurated. Lectures to decorative workmen. 

1855. — Academy Notes began. Studied shipping at Deal. Modern 
Painters, vols. iii. and iv. 

1856. — Address to workmen of the Oxford Museum. Tour in 
Switzerland. Elements of Drawing. 

1857. — Lecture to Archit. Assoc, Imagination in Architecture. 
Address to St Martin's School of Art. Lecture, Political 
Economy of Art, at Manchester. Address to Working Men's 
College. Tour in Scotland. Arranged Turner drawings at 
National Gallery. 

1858. — Lecture, Conventional Art, S. Kensington. Lecture, Work 
of Iro7i, Tunbridge Wells. Official Report on Turner bequest. 
Address, Study of Art, St Martin's School. Tour alone in 
Switzerland and Italy, studying Veronese at Turin. Inaugural 
address to Cambridge School of Art. 

1859. — Lecture, Unity of Art, Royal Institution. \.&cXx\xe, Modern 
Mamifacture and Design, Bradford. Address, Switzerlana, 
Working Men's College. Last tour with parents, in Germany. 

i860. — Address, Religiotis Art, Working Men's College. Modern 
Painters, vol. v. Unto this Last, at Chamouni. 

1861. — Gave Turner drawings to Oxford and to Cambridge. Ad- 
dresses, St George's Mission, Denmark Hill ; Tree Twigs, 
Royal Institution ; Illuminated Missals, Burlington House. 
Tour in Savoy. Munera Pulveris. 

1862. — Studied Luini at Milan. 

1863.- — Studied Limestone Alps. Lecture, Stratified Alps, Royal 
Institution. 

1864. — Lecture at Working Men's College. His father died. 
Lecture, Traffic, Bradford. Lectures, King''s Treasuries and 
Queen's Gardens, and address at Grammar-School, Manchester. 

1865. — Lecture, Work and Play, Camberwell. Addresses at 
Working Men's College. Address to R.I.B.A., Study of 
Architecture, Lecture, War, Woolwich Royal Military College. 

1866. — With friends in Switzerland. Study of geology and botany. 
Spoke at meeting of the Eyre Defence Committee. 

1867. — Tirne and Tide. Rede Lecture. Lecture, Modern Art, 
Royal Institution. 

1868. — Lecture, Myste>y of Life, Dublin. Address, Three-legged 
Stool of Art, Jcrmyn Street. Tour in Belgium and France 
with Professor Norton and others. 



296 JOHN RUSKIN. 

1869. — Lecture, Flamboyant Architecture of the Somme, Royal 
Institution. Lecture, Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm, 
University College. Lecture, Hercules of Camarina, South 
Lambeth School of Art. To France, Switzerland, Verona, 
and Venice. Elected Slade Professor. Lecture, Future of 
England, Woolwich. 

1870. — Lecture, Verona and rts Rivers, Royal Institution. First 
and Second Slade courses at Oxford. To Switzerland and 
Italy. Study of coins at the British Museum. Lecture, Story 
of Arachne, Woolwich, 

1 87 1. — Fors Clavigera, No. I. Slade course on landscape. 
Dangerous illness at Matlock. Tour to Lakes and Scot- 
land. Endowment of Mastership of Drawing, at Oxford. 
Elected Lord Rector of St Andrews University. His mother 
died. 

1872. — Lecture, The Bird of Calm, Woolwich. Slade courses, 
Eagle's Nest and Ariadne Florentina. In residence at Corpus 
Christi College. In Italy. First residence at Brantwood. 

1873. — Re-elected Slade Professor. V2.^^qx, Nature and Authority 
of ]\Iiracle, Grosvenor Hotel. Lectures, Robin, Sivalloio, and 
C/^^i(f//, Oxford and Eton. Slade course, Val d^Aj-no. 

1874. — To Rome and Sicily, studied Giotto at Assisi. Slade 
course, Alps and yiira, and Schools of Floi-entine Art. 
Lecture, Botticelli, at Eton. 

1875. — Lecture, Glacial Action, Royal Institution. Slade course. 
Sir Joshua Reynolds. Lecture, Spanish Chapel, Eton. 

1876. — Lectures, Precious Stones, Christ's Hospital ; Minerals, 
Woolwich. Posting tours in England. To Switzerland. 

1S77. — Studied Carpaccio at Venice. Speech to Society for Pre- 
vention of Cruelty to Animals, Heme Hill. Lecture, Yewdale 
and its Streamlets, Kendal. Slade course. Readings in Modern 
Painters. Lecture, Streams of Westmoreland, Eton. 

1878. — At Windsor Castle ; at Hawarden. Turner exhibition in 
Bond Street. Illness at Brantwood. Whistler versus Ruskin 
trial. 

1879. — Received Prince Leopold at St George's Museum, Sheffield. 

1880. — Lectures, Snakes, London Institution ; Amiens, Eton. To 
Abbeville, Amiens, Beauvais, Chartres, Rouen. 

1882. — Copied in National Gallery. In France and Iialy. Met 
Miss Alexander at Florence. Lecture, Cistercian Architecture, 
London Institute. 



CHRONOLOGY. 297 

18S3. — Slade course, Art of England. Lecture, Francesca Alex- 
ander and Kate Greenaivay, Kensington, Tour to Scotland. 
Lecture, Sir Herbert Edwardes, Coniston. 

1S84. — Lecture, The Storm Cloud, London Institution. Lecture 
to Academy Girls. Slade course, The Pleasures of England. 

1S85. — Address to Society of Friends of Living Creatures, Bedford 
Park. 

\%Z6.—Praterita. 

1887. — A posting journey in England. 

1888. — To Beauvais, the Jura, Venice, Berne. Last No. of 
Pr(eterita. 

1900. — ^January 20. Death at Brantwood, Coniston. 



INDEX. 



Air, The Queen of the, 189. 

Amiens, The Bible of , 265. 

Aratra Pentelici, 209. 

Architecture and Painting, Lec- 
tures on, 127 et seq, 

Ariadne Florentina, 227, 

Arrows of the Chace, 284. 

Art, Lectures on, 194. 

Art, The Political Economy of, 
136. 

Bible of Amiens, The, 265. 
Botticelli, 232, 233. 
Brown, Dr John, 289, 
Browning, 133, 134. 
Byron, 5, 133. 

■Carlyle, 8, 159, 236, 285, 289. 

Carpaccio, 260, 264. 

■Claude, 11, 12, 16, 18, 32, 35, 54, 

75- 
Cobbett, William, 159. 
Coleridge, 133. 
Constable, John, 54. 
Coreggio, 80, 91. 
' Cornhill Magazine, The,' 152, 

164. 
Crabbe, 133. 
Crown of Wild Olive, The, 179. 

Dante, 195. 
Dcucalio?i, 244. 

Dickens, Charles, 5, 37, 238, 257, 
282. 



Domenichino, 23. 
Drawijig, Elemcttts of, 131. 
Di^irer, Albert, 75. 
Dust, Ethics of the, 284. 

Eagle's Nest, The, 214. 
Edgeworth, Maria, 282. 
Elements of Drawing, 131. 
Elements of Perspective, 135. 
Eliot, George, 61. 
Emerson, 281. 

England, The Pleasures of, 284. 
Ethics of the Dust, 284. 

Fawcett, Henry, 277. 
Fdsole, The Laivs of 284, 
Fiction Fair and Foul, 60. 
Fielding, Copley, 285, 286. 
Florence, Mornings in, 258. 
Forbes, James, 247. 
Fors Clavigera, 270. 
' Eraser's Magazine,' 164. 

Gainsborough, 12, 195. 
Gautier, Thfephile, 18. 
Goethe, 281. 
Golde?i River, The King of the, 

287. 
Gibbon, Edward, 17, 34, 262 

283. 
Giorgione, 78, 80. 
Giotto, 258. 

Guild, St George's, 271, 272. 
Guinicelli, Guido, 167. 



INDEX. 



299 



Holbein, 68, 71, 232, 233. 
Hooker, Richard, 47, 283. 
Hortus Inclusus, 284. 
Hunt, Holman, 122, 125. 
Hunt, William, 132. 
Huxley, Professor, 250. 

Johnson, Samuel, 34, 48, 58, 257, 
263, 286. 

Keats, 133. 

King of the Golden River, The, 

287. 
Kingsley, Charles, 56. 

Landseer, Sir Edwin, 45, tj. 
Laws of Fisole, The, 284. 
Lectures on Architecture and 

Painting, 127 et seq. 
Lectttres on Art, 194. 
Lilies, Sesame and, 166, 185. 
Longfellow, 133. 
Loves Meinie, 245. 
Lowell, J. R., 133. 

Macaulay, 286. 

Marmontel, Jean Fran9ois, 167, 

279. 
Meredith, Mr George, 72, 197. 
Michelangiolo, 20, 42, 49, 213. 
Mill, J. S., 157 et seq., 162, 275. 
Millais, 122, 222. 
Milton, 170. 
Modern Painters, vol. i., 10 et 

seq. ; vol. ii., -^^etseq. ; vol. iii., 

48 et seq. ; vol. iv., 61 et seq. ; 

vol. v. , 67 et seq. 
Mornings in Florence, 258. 

Northcote, James, i. 
Norton, Professor Charles E.. 8, 
290. 

Olive, The Crown of Wild, 179. 
On the Old Road, 284. 

Paths, The Two, 140. 
Patmore, Coventry, loi, 133. 
Perspective, Elements of, 135. 
Pisano, Giovanni, 238, 242. 
Pisano, Nicola, 258. 
Pleasures of England, The, 284. 
Political Economy of Art, The, 
136. 



Poussin, Caspar, 11, 12, 16, 28, 

30. 33> 37, 75- 

Poussin, Nicole, 71. 

Prccterita, 284. 

Pre-Raf/iaelitistn, Ruskin's pam« 
phlet on, 123, 200. 

Pre-Raphaelitism, The Three Col- 
ours of, 125, 268. 

Proserpina, 245, 251. 

Quee?i of the Air, The, 189. 

Raphael, 14, 42, 94. 

Reade, Charles, 279. 

Rembrandt, 22, 50. 

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 14, 48, 80, 

108, 195, 199. 
Ricardo, 159. 
Road, On the Old, 284. 
Roberts, David, 288. 
Rogers, Samuel, 5. 
Rosa, Salvator, 11, 12, 15, 16, 28, 

30> 34. 35. 75- 
Rossetti, 133. 
Rubens, 20, 31, 70, 108. 

Scott, Sir W., 5, 55, 59, 133, 173, 

244, 282. 
Sesame and Lilies, 166, 185. 
Seven Latnps of .-I rchilecture, The, 

82 et seq. 
Severn, Mrs Arthur, 7. 
Shakespeare, 173, 216. 
Shelley, 133. 
Slade, Felix, 6. 
Smith, Sydney, 290. 
Spenser, 173. 
Stewart, Dugald, 43. 
St George's Guild, 271, 272. 
St Mark's Rest, 260. 
Stones of Venice, The, 102 et 

seq. 
Swift, Jonathan, 167. 

Teniers, 16. 

Tennyson, 133. 

Thackeray, 164, 282. 

Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism, 

The, 125, 268. 
Time and Tide by Weare and 

Tyne, 183. 
Tintoret, 80. 

Titian, 14, 59, 68, 71, 80, 144. 
Tolstoi, 272. 



300 



INDEX. 



Turner, John, 6, lo, 12, 18, 21, 24 Vandyck, 70. 

et seq., 29, 31 et seq., 48, 59, 62, Velasquez, jj. 

71, 78, 79, 80, 125, 176, 206, Venice, The Stones of, 102 et 

244, 285. seq. 

Two Paths, The, 140. Veronese, Paul, 50, 51, 80, io8. 

Tyndall, Professor, 189, 245, 247. 

Weare arid Tyne, Time and Tide 
Unto This Last, 152. by, 183. 

Wild Olive, The Crown of, 179. 
Val D'Arno, 235. Wordsworth, 133. 



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